"The Young Dreamer, With Eyes Wide Open ‘Barack Obama: The Story,’ by David Maraniss"

Barack Obama with his grandparents Stanley Armour Dunham and Madelyn Dunham in New York in the 1980s.

  MICHIKO KAKUTANI (New York Times):

Barack Obama’s life, says his latest biographer, David Maraniss, was to an astonishing extent “the product of randomness.” His mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, the only child of a couple from Kansas, met his father, Barack Hussein Obama, a student from Kenya, in an elementary Russian language class at the University of Hawaii, and the young Barry Obama would grow up in Hawaii and Indonesia, taking an odd, zigzagging and totally improbable road to the White House. And yet, Mr. Maraniss makes clear, despite the bewildering role that chance played in Mr. Obama’s story, he has been very much the author of his own life — an outsider, who, in the very American tradition of literary heroes like Gatsby, “raised himself” and forged an identity through a series of self-conscious and deliberate choices. MORE...