To capture the complex story of Barack Obama, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Maraniss (associate editor, Washington Post; Rome 1960: The Summer Olympics That Stirred the World) writes what he calls "not a traditional biography." He begins with narratives of Obama's American and African ancestors several generations before he was born and ends with the 27-year-old community organizer leaving Chicago for Harvard Law School. Maraniss conducted numerous interviews with Obama's family, friends, and fellow students (all cited in the notes) to show that change has been the most constant circumstance in the president's life, e.g., being raised mostly by his grandparents in Hawaii (and in a sense having to raise himself) while his mother studied in Indonesia; moving to Los Angeles and then to New York, for college; heading to Chicago for three years as a community organizer; then finally returning east to Harvard. Throughout, Maraniss notes Obama's "determination to avoid life's traps." His struggle to find stability in his volatile world is the book's prominent recurring theme. VERDICT General readers, including those who enjoyed David Remnick's The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, will be gripped by this absorbing, graceful account. [See Prepub Alert, 12/19/11.]-Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

During his 2008 campaign, Barack Obama so often stressed the improbability of his story that we have grown inured to how unlikely it really is. Everyone knows that his name, along with his inexperience, was an electoral handicap; that his mixed-race background made his victory historic; and that his transformation within five years from local Illinois politician to the most famous person on earth (and first incumbent president since Woodrow Wilson to win the Nobel Peace Prize) has no obvious parallel. The great virtue of David Maraniss's huge and absorbing new biography is to demonstrate that Obama's saga in its full and previously unexplored detail is more surprising and gripping than the version the world is familiar with. The engrossing parts of "Barack Obama: The Story" are not the ones that created the most pre-publication buzz: the diary entries from one of Obama's girlfriends in his New York days in the early 1980s. This was Genevieve Cook, a white Australian, who let Maraniss quote the notes she made during her infatuation with Obama and eventual estrangement - including the judgment that for all his initial charm, he proved to be too cool and distant In the context of current politics, that may seem a relevant insight. But in the context of this book, those entries are almost ho-hum, precisely because they could have come from any troubled "it's not about you ..." relationship. The rest of Maraniss's chronicle, which very minutely traces the president's African and American lineages back for more than a century, is far more unusual. Maraniss, a Washington Post veteran and author of a celebrated biography of Bill Clinton and other works, has (with assistants whom he credits) applied a version of the Robert Caro treatment to a politician who, unlike Caro's Lyndon Johnson, is still in his functioning prime. The book begins with people Barack Obama never met and certainly knows less about than Maraniss does, his great-grandparents on both sides. Nearly 600 pages later it ends with the current president, at age 27, driving a used yellow Datsun away from Chicago, where he had been a community organizer, to Harvard Law School and what Maraniss presents as the end of his search for identity and the beginning of a purposeful political career. To my taste the book has two imperfections. First, details pile up in encyclopedic volume sometimes unrelated to their significance. One example, of a large number I noted: It is important to know what Obama's American grandfather and great-uncle did in combat during World War II, less so to see a list of people from the same Kansas county who were killed. Perhaps Maraniss wanted to leave no doubt about the thoroughness of his research, but even at half the book's length that would have been clear. Also, when Maraniss departs from narrative and steps in to "tell" rather than "show," his presentation of themes can sound balder than the subtle complexities evident from the tale itself. For instance, about Obama's Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama: "There were times, foreshadowing the circumstances of his American grandson, when he was dismissed by some of his own people for acting white, or not seeming black enough." The "foreshadowing" part is evident without belaboring. NONETHELESS, this is a revelatory book, which anyone interested in modern politics will want to read, and which will certainly shape our understanding of President Obama's strengths, weaknesses and inscrutabilities. Every few pages Maraniss offers a factual nugget that changes or enlarges the prevailing lore. For example: Obama's Kenyan grandfather, who had five wives, was apparently not involved in Kenyan insurgencies or ever tortured by British colonialists during the Mau Mau era. (Indeed, he remained a trusted figure among white Kenyans - and although himself a convert to Islam, he sent his son to a Christian school.) Similarly: Obama's mother was named Stanley Ann Dunham not at the perverse insistence of her father, Stanley, but because her mother was taken by the sophistication of a Bette Davis character, a woman named Stanley, in the movie "In This Our Life," which she saw while pregnant. The entire tale is too vast to summarize, but four narratives dominate. The most tragically self-destructive is that of Obama's own father, who dazzled people in Africa and America with his intelligence and eloquence but ruined other lives and finally his own with his irresponsibility. He had a wife in Kenya, with two children, when at the University of Hawaii he met, romanced and impregnated the 17-year-old Stanley Ann Dunham in 1960. They married, but she went home to Seattle a month after the birth of "Barry" in 1961. (The book's details about a doctor who remembered the case would change the minds of any "birthers" open to factual evidence.) Maraniss says that "perhaps the luckiest thing" in young Obama's life was that afterward he saw almost nothing of his father, "sparing his mother and him years of unpredictability and potential domestic violence." On his return to Kenya, the senior Barack Obama went into a debauched alcoholic spiral and was involved in countless car crashes before the one that killed him in 1982, when he was 48 and his son was 21. Obama's two American grandparents, Madelyn Payne and Stanley Dunham, are also compelling figures. On the surface they are Greatest Generation stalwarts: he a combat veteran, she a bomber-plant worker, young sweethearts from small-town Kansas secretly married on the night of a high school banquet. (Grandfather Stanley, with his long face and big ears, is also the forebear with the most striking physical resemblance to Barack Obama; the president looks almost nothing like his African father.) Under the surface, the Dunhams' life was tense. Stanley's childhood had been shattered when his mother killed herself. As an adult, he was increasingly a big-talking but disappointed salesman, while his wife, who became a bank official, took responsibility for the family and for the grandson who came to live with them rather than his mother. Maraniss's portrayal of Obama's mother, which complements that of Janny Scott in her 2011 book "A Singular Woman," makes clear that even for her time Stanley Ann Dunham was a romantic and a risk taker. She sought adventure and was "afraid of smallness." She married a Kenyan at 18 and an Indonesian at 22. She placed her son in elementary school in Jakarta - a school for the country's academic elite, Maraniss shows, not an Islamic madrassa - and then sent him away, to her parents, as she delved deeper into Javanese culture. I will not be the only reader to finish this book feeling acute loss that Stanley Ann Dunham, who died of cancer at 52 before her son's first run for any office, is not around to behold and explain the man he has become. And the narrative of her son: The evidence Maraniss has collected about this pre-law-school stage in Barack Obama's life suggests a richer view of the man we have become familiar with, without really knowing. The years as a boy in Indonesia, where chubby Barry Soetoro (his stepfather's last name) with his curly hair was assumed to be from Ambon or some other nearby island of darker-skinned people. Adolescence in Hawaii, where he was thought of as one of many hapa, or multiracial, people rather than placed on the unavoidable black-white grid of mainland America. Maraniss explains how Obama entered Occidental College as Barry and left as Barack, having decided on his first exposure to mainland culture that he must be black rather than white, a decision ratified through his time at Columbia and in Chicago. And yet, as Maraniss says, a "recurring theme is his determination to avoid life's traps." These include "the trap of his unusual family biography . . . in terms of stability and psychology. Then the trap of geography," from being raised in Hawaii, and "finally the trap of race in America, with its likelihood of rejection and cynicism." Anything that might have seemed odd in Barack Obama's demeanor, from his studied unflappability to his sometimes unappealing coldness, seems instead a miracle of normality and adjustment after the story recounted here. We never fully know public figures, least of all one whose identity so much involves cool, deliberate reserve. But after this book we know one public figure much better. James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and the author, most recently, of "China Airborne."

Between epic framing and prosaic content, a canny portrait of the 44th president through the age of 27 finally emerges from this sprawling biography. Journalist and bestselling author Maraniss (First In His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton) dwells too grandly on the mythic confluence of Kenya and Kansas in Obama's veins; he's more cogent in analyzing the legacy of his father's keen intellect, his mother's self-possession, social conscience, and anthropologist's neutrality, and Obama's cosmopolitan childhood spent bouncing between Hawaii and Indonesia. Deploying exhaustive research, including countless interviews with friends to correct Obama's distorted memoir of youthful racial alienation, the author depicts a well-adjusted, basketball-crazy kid whose uneventful life involves more reflecting than experiencing. Maraniss pads this less-than-gripping narrative with the meatier back-stories of forebears, many scenes of the college-age Obama brooding over his identity, and pages of relationship angst from a girlfriend's diary. The book doesn't gel until the final chapter on Obama's community organizing work in Chicago, where strands of his personality-detachment, aversion to confrontation, consensus-seeking, idealism tempered by an understanding of the realities of power, a "determination to avoid life's traps"-coalesce into his mature politics. Obama's story here is interior and un-charismatic, but it makes for a revealing study in character-formation as destiny. The book ends as Obama prepares to enter Harvard Law. Photos. Agent: Rafe Sagalyn, Sagalyn Literary Agency. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

*Starred Review* In keeping with the notion that the past is never dead, Maraniss begins this nontraditional biography long before Obama was born and ends long before the most historic events of his life, entering politics and becoming president of the U.S. Seamlessly weaving details of regional history and Obama's family, Maraniss alternates between the history of the Dunhams, starting in Kansas, and the Obamas, starting in Kenya. The separate paths finally meet in Hawaii, when Barack Hussein Obama and Stanley Ann Dunham meet in a Russian class. Drawing on interviews, some with Obama himself, letters, journals, and other documents, Maraniss details the history of Obama's two families and the commonalities of intelligence and restlessness. He traces Obama's life through childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood as he began his career as a community organizer. This is a highly textured and intimate look at the family stories behind Obama, the social, economic, and cultural forces that influenced the fateful decisions they made. Maraniss examines the best-laid plans and serendipity of life, how by a twist or turn in numerous decisions along the way, history might have been very different. A thoroughly fascinating, multigenerational biography that explores broader social and political changes even as it highlights the elements that shaped one man's life. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Maraniss is the Pulitzer Prize-winning associate editor of the Washington Post and the author of multiple best-sellers; his high profile guarantees plenty of attention for his latest.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2010 Booklist

Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post journalist Maraniss has now cemented his reputation as a writer extraordinaire of pre-presidential biographies with Barack Obama: The Story. Anyone interested in the modern presidency will want to read this refreshingly complex portrait of Obama's early years, which offers insights into the man he has become. The book's overall form and structure is patterned after and very similar to the author's earlier work, First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton (1995). Maraniss also borrows a technique he perfected in They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967 (2003), in which he uses multiple narratives to tell the story. In this case, the author looks at Obama through the individuals who had the profoundest influence on the president's formative years, including his absent father, his mother (Stanley Ann Dunham, who died just days before Obama's inauguration), and his American grandparents. The book traces the story of young "Barry" in multiracial Hawai'i and Indonesia to his days at Occidental College, where his identity as a young black man named Barack came into being, and finally to Chicago, where Obama began his public life. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. B. Miller University of Cincinnati-Clermont

An exhaustive, respectful study of the president's "shattered genealogy," from Kansas to Kenya, Hawaii to Indonesia. Washington Post associate editor Maraniss (Into the Story: A Writer's Journey Through Life, Politics, Sports and Loss, 2010, etc.) painstakingly constructs a sensible, solid grounding beneath the mythology of the current president. However, note that Obama only reaches age 27 in this long biography. Accepted to Harvard Law School, his political future "still amorphous but taking shape," he resolved finally to visit the land of his absent father, Kenya, and make sense of his African heritage. "Leaving and being left" had become the themes of his childhood, and Maraniss has certainly done his homework, delving both into the original Kansas Dunham clan, marked by the suicide by poisoning of Obama's great-grandmother Ruth Dunham, in 1926, and the prideful rise and tortured demise of Obama's father and namesake, the Harvard-educated economist who was undone by hubris and alcoholism. Considering the many tangled strands of Obama's story, it is extraordinary that he did not lose himself. Yet these same "misfits" in his family, especially his hardworking mother and her Kansan parents, Stanley and Madelyn, embraced the biracial grandson unconditionally, shielding him from the bigotry of the era by entertaining the tale that he descended from Hawaiian royalty. Maraniss' portrayal of Barack Obama senior, from astute political mind to abusive husband and self-destructive drinker, is masterful and moving, while "Barry" the son emerges very gradually from the cocoon of his elite Honolulu boarding school to grasp his identity as an African-American young man at Occidental College and then Columbia in the 1980s. Maraniss stresses that Obama's Muslim ancestors encompass only one facet to his complex, fascinating makeup. Another in the author's line of authoritative biographies.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.