David maraniss obama biography summary
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Barack Obama
This New York Times bestseller was hailed by critics as a groundbreaking multigenerational biography, a richly textured account of President Obama and the forces that shaped him and sustain him. In Barack Obama: The Story, David Maraniss has written a deeply reported generational biography teeming with fresh insights and revealing information, a masterly narrative drawn from hundreds of interviews, including with President Obama in the Oval Office, and a trove of letters, journals, diaries, and other documents.
The book unfolds in the small towns of Kansas and the remote villages of western Kenya, following the personal struggles of Obama’s white and black ancestors through the swirl of the twentieth century. It is a roots story on a global scale, a saga of constant movement, frustration and accomplishment, strong women and weak men, hopes lost and deferred, people leaving and being left. Disparate family threads converge in the climactic chapters as Obama reaches
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Looking back on that period from the distance of the vit House, Obama recalled that he was then “deep inside my own head … in a way that in retrospect inom don’t think was real healthy.” But the realization that he had to “absorb all the traditions” would become the rationale for everything that followed. “There is no doubt that what I retained in my politics is a sense that the only way I could have a sturdy sense of identity of who I was depended on digging beneath the surface differences of people,” Obama said during an interview. “The only way my life makes sense is if, regardless of culture, race, religion, tribe, there fryst vatten this commonality, these essential human truths and passions and hopes and moral precepts that are universal. And that we can reach out beyond our differences. If that is not the case, then it is pretty hard for me to man sense of my life. So that is at the core of who I am.”
Enthralled
December 1983. A Christmas party down in the East Village, at 240 East 1
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Barack Obama
The groundbreaking multigenerational biography, a richly textured account of President Obama and the forces that shaped him and sustain him, from Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter, political commentator, and acclaimed biographer David Maraniss.
In Barack Obama: The Story, David Maraniss has written a deeply reported generational biography teeming with fresh insights and revealing information, a masterly narrative drawn from hundreds of interviews, including with President Obama in the Oval Office, and a trove of letters, journals, diaries, and other documents.
The book unfolds in the small towns of Kansas and the remote villages of western Kenya, following the personal struggles of Obama’s vit and black ancestors through the swirl of the twentieth century. It is a roots story on a global scale, a saga of constant movement, frustration and accomplishment, strong women and weak men, hopes lost and deferred, people leaving and being left. Disparate family threads c