‘Rising Star’ examines Obama’s political life

New bio questions his 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 wellregarded, 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 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 paving brick and about as subtle as one heaved through a picture window.

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 one-time girlfriend, Oberlin professor Sheila Miyoshi Jager. Ultimately, Garrow contends, Obama decided 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.

But Garrow’s research cries out for a discerning editor. 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.