Book Review - Barack Obama: the making of the man by David Maraniss
What impressed me most about this book was the research. David Maraniss uncovered direct stories of people who knew and experienced Obama's various connections and brought it together in a single piece.
Maraniss travelled to each location where Obama lived - Chicago, New York, LA, Hawaii, Indonesia (and Kenya where his father is from) - and went to great extents to learn of the history stretching back generations. To understand Obama this is important, because the strands of his thinking and persona, like all of us, find common threads in generations before. A certain trait will have links to a certain forebear. A particular style or approach can be linked to a particular experience growing up. Maraniss, remarkably, at times is able to pinpoint this as people connected to Obama reflect and share their knowledge and history.
Where the book is effective is where it finds synergy between the contradictions and moulds that shaped Obama's personal and political life. Maraniss reaffirms that his struggle for identity is a central tenet and worth sharing. Context is important, and the book is filled with easy-to-read character and content. Such accounts, the randomness nature of parts and stories, and the way Maraniss describes the detail makes more appealing the intrigue and mystic of Obama's life and his achievements.
Where the book disappoints is the relentless search for supposed mishaps in Obama's recollection of his life, as told in Dreams From My Father. Maraniss acknowledges the introduction to Dreams by Obama: 'for the sake of compression, some of the characters that appear are composites of people I've known, and some events appear out of precise chronology'. Maraniss tries to argue that through his research he's uncovered events that go beyond this, and so puts forward a personal opinion about what is ultimately a subjective matter. There is nothing wrong with this, but the repeated reference to this case detracts from the core motivation which should have been to share the research, knowledge and accounts and let the reader decide for themselves. (Further, that Obama gave context and an admission at the introduction of his book strengthens my point about this.)
Writing this review some time after I read it, what I recall most are vivid descriptions of particular events: the sad stories of Obama senior and, ultimately, his death; the teenage-like life growing up in Hawaii and how at times it reminded me of my life growing up in Darwin; the scale and depth of Obama's involvement at College and his community activism work; the different worlds of generations before and what life was like for them; and so on. This book is full of so many interesting stories retold in a simple and effective way.
After reading the book I came to appreciate more Obama's personal struggle for identity and how, upon owning it, he was able to build a platform for a political and transformative shift. Through the diversity of growing up such as he did, to that of his friends at various schools, to his journey on the south side of Chicago, and to the time before entering politics this book time and time again gives context and shape to this central notion and idea: finding and owning identity amongst complexity.
Indeed, that Obama, yesterday, was to secure a second term as President in the face of significant national economic challenges gives credence to the view that the mysticism of this journey does not substitute for the capacity for leadership. His victory was substantial. It was an endorsement of Obama's capability to make technical decisions at a Presidential level. The danger of mystifying his journey as remarkable should not, and does not, in my view, truncate the importance of this capacity and the trust of the people. And so it is 'hope', and how this spreads across and impacts society, that makes this personal account of Obama's life pre-politics such an important and compelling read for anyone.
One excerpt as an example of what I enjoyed:
Obama was the central character of his letters, in a self-conscious way, with variations on the theme of his search for purpose and self-identity. In one letter[he wrote]...'caught without a class, a structure, or tradition to support me, in a sense the choice to take a different path is made for me...the only way to assuage my feelings of isolation are to absorb all the traditions [and all the] classes; make them mine, me theirs'.
Here, at age twenty-two, was an idea that would become a key to later understanding Obama the politician and public figure. Without a class meant that he was entering his adult lief without financial security. Without a structure meant he had grown up lacking a solid family foundation, his father gone from the start, his mother often elsewhere, his grandparent doing the best they could, but all leading to his sense of being a rootless outsider. Without a tradition was a reference to his lack of religious grounding and his hapa status, white and black, feeling completely at home in neither race. Eventually he could make a few essential choices in terms of how he would live out his personal life, moving inexorably toward the black world. But in a larger sense, in terms of his ambitions beyond family, he did not want to be constricted by narrow choices. The different path he saw for himself was to rise above the divisions of culture and society, politics and economics, and embrace something larger - embrace it all. To make a particular choice would be to limit him, he wrote in the letter to Alex, because 'taken separately, they are unacceptable and untenable'.
Looking back on that period from the distance of the White House, Obama recalled that he was then 'deep inside my own head...in a way that in retrospect I don't think was real healthy'. But the realisation that he had to 'absorb all the traditions' would become the rationale for all 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 on November 10, 2011. 'The only way my life makes sense is if regardless of culture, race, religion, tribe, there is 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 make sense of my life. So that is at the core of who I am'. - page 452.
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