Obama before the White House

appeared in newspapers and magazines over the years. Mr Garrow has turned up little that’s substantially new — save for identifying and interviewing an old girlfriend from Obama’s early Chicago years, who claims that by 1987, “he already had his sights on becoming president.”

In the absence of thoughtful analysis or a powerful narrative through line, Mr Garrow’s book settles for barraging the reader with a cascade of details — seemingly in hopes of creating a kind of pointillist picture. The problem is that all these data points never connect to form an illuminating portrait.

While the Chicago chapter sheds valuable light on Mr Obama’s connection with black residents and his developing sense of vocation, many of the other sections that try to chronicle his day-to-day life feel extraneous and absurdly long-winded, as if Mr Garrow wanted to include every last scrap of information he’d unearthed. Are we really interested in what numerous Mr Obama classmates, colleagues and passing acquaintances remember about his personality? Do we really want to read repetitious discussions about his cigarette consumption and poker-playing habits?

Indeed, this entire book suffers from a poor sense of proportion. Mr Garrow adds nothing to our understanding of Mr Obama’s intellectual evolution during his years at Columbia, or the role that the civil rights movement played in shaping his political consciousness and ideals. (Curious, given that Mr Garrow, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for his book on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Bearing the Cross.”) The entire first chapter of the book is devoted to examining the social and political landscape of Chicago’s South Side in the early 1980s

Mr Obama arrived to work there, but Mr Obama’s 2008 campaign and two terms in the White House are compressed into a 50-odd-page epilogue.

Perhaps, as the title Rising Star indicates, this book is meant to focus only on Mr Obama’s early years, but in that case, the epilogue — with the snarky title of “The President Did Not Attend, as He Was Golfing” — seems even more inexplicable.

Whereas the rest of the book is written in dry, largely uninflected prose, the epilogue — which almost reads like a Republican attack ad — devolves into a condescending diatribe unworthy of a serious historian. Mr Garrow’s epilogue delivers a crude screed against Mr Obama the president and Mr Obama the man, filled with bald assertions and coy halftruths. He suggests that Obama’s presidency was a long string of failures and disappointments and that “behind the scenes, many Democrats were just as eager for Barack to exit the White House as he himself now seemed,” when, in fact, he left office as one of the most popular presidents in recent decades.

Then there is the innuendo. Mr Garrow portentously cites a poll indicating that 64 percent of Republicans and 42 percent of whites agreed that it was “probably true” that Mr Obama was “hiding important information about his background and early life.” This could be a reference to the birther movement, or perhaps to the bitter musings of Sheila Miyoshi Jager, the former girlfriend Mr Obama had met in Chicago — who remained upset for years over their breakup, and whom Mr Garrow has turned into one of his main sources.

It’s odd that Mr Garrow should seize on one former lover’s anger and hurt, and try to turn them into a Rosebud-like key to the former president’s life, referring to her repeatedly in his epilogue. He even tries to turn her perception — about Mr Obama’s having willed himself into being — into a pejorative, when the act of selfinvention, as other biographers have noted, was the enterprising and existential act of a young man who essentially had been abandoned by both his black father and white mother, and who found himself caught between cultures and trying, as he wrote in Dreams, “to raise myself to be a black man in America.”

Perhaps Mr Garrow leans so heavily on Ms Jager because she is a source mentioned only in passing (and not by name) in David Maraniss’s Barack Obama: The Story (2012). It’s telling, after all, that Mr Garrow mischaracterises the reception that both Mr Maraniss’s biography and David Remnick’s incisive book The Bridge received, suggesting that both volumes failed to get the accolades they did, in fact, receive.

The reader interested in Barack Obama’s life would do well to turn to those books, and not this overstuffed and ultimately unfair work here. Or, go back to Obama’s own eloquent memoir. The Making of Barack Obama By David J Garrow William Morrow 1,460 pages; $45