Weighty ‘Rising Star’ probes Obama’s climb
Questions love for his mom, motives in marrying Michelle
When he gave his speech before the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama seemed to have exploded out of nowhere, and his political career never looked back. Four years later, he was elected president, and polls now show a majority would welcome him back.
But maybe not historian and biographer David J. Garrow. The young Obama he shows in the mammoth Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama (William Morrow, 1,078 pp., eeeE out of four) is a magnetic but calculating shape shifter who nursed presidential ambitions for far longer than he admitted or wanted anyone to know.
Garrow, who has written well-regarded and deeply researched books on Martin Luther King Jr. and the history of reproductive rights, has a huge challenge with Obama. Few already had written memoirs on their own lives, as Obama had, before becoming president. Dreams From My Father, which Obama wrote after he became the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review, created the template for future books about the president.
Rising Star is Garrow’s attempt to crack that template, and he does so with a book as heavy as a brick and about as subtle as one heaved through a picture window.
Consider, for example, Obama’s comments about the impact his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, had on his life. “He had never spoken so glowingly during Ann’s lifetime of her impact on his life, but in the years following her death at age fifty-two, his memories of her became far warmer than they had ever been when she was alive.”
Not content with questioning Obama’s love for his mother, Garrow goes into great detail about the future president’s relationship with his wife, Michelle, and whether his decision to marry her stemmed more from politics than love. Garrow puts great faith in the memories of Obama’s onetime girlfriend, Oberlin professor Sheila Miyoshi Jager, whose three-year relationship with Obama is treated with as much seriousness as the decision to kill Osama bin Laden. Ultimately, Garrow contends, Obama decided that if he would pursue a career in politics in black Chicago, he could not be married to a white woman.
Each page crackles with the strength of his research, and the footnotes groan with detail. It’s a prodigious work, and one that will provide the foundation for any serious Obama biographer in the future. It shows the depth and richness of Obama’s life.
For all its length and heft, however, Rising Star lacks the sense of place and time that other presidential biographers, such as Robert Caro and David McCullough, brought to their books about Lyndon Johnson and Harry Truman. We don’t feel the heat and humidity of Indonesia, where Obama spent some of his formative childhood years, the way Caro made us feel about the Texas Hill Country that shaped Johnson.
Instead, Garrow’s research cries out for a discerning editor. There’s simply too much. Do we really need to know the title of Obama’s English textbook at the Punahou School or the catalog number for his physics course at Columbia? Everything, including Obama’s inability to figure out how to use the mouse for his new Macintosh computer, is here. It didn’t need to be in the story of such a historic figure.