Book Review: Rising Star

    • TNN
    • Publish Date: May 17 2017 3:11PM
    • |
    • Updated Date: May 17 2017 3:11PM
Book Review: Rising Star

Barack Obama created history by becoming the first African-American to serve as the president of the United States of America. Being an iconic figure in American history, Obama garners people's attention and so does a new biography of him written by Pulitzer Prize winning author David J Garrow.
Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama by David J Garrow is a 1460-page voluminous biography of Barack Obama which extensively talks about his formative years and influential figures who helped in the making of an extraordinary leader. The book chronicles, in great detail, Obama's life-- his tumultuous childhood in Honolulu and Jakarta, being a community organizer on Chicago's South Side in his formative years, studying at Harvard Law School where he excelled, and how he planned and pursued his political journey in Chicago. The extensive research by Garrow can be seen in the book with more than 1,000 interviews of people who have interacted with Obama in his pre-presidential years.
What is remarkable about the biography is that Garrow has followed each step that Obama took in his formative years and managed to unearth one of his ex-girfriends, Sheila Miyoshi Jager, who was virtually written out in Obama's own memoir Dreams From My Father. Jager was in a relationship with Obama for three years, before he met Michelle, and is a recurring figure in Rising Star . Garrow extensively covers Jager's memories of Obama in the book. The biography reveals that Obama's decision to marry Michelle was politically driven as he decided that he could not be married to a white woman if he wanted to pursue a career in politics!
Overall, Garrow's revelations of Obama's ambition, struggles and planning to be the first black president of the US is an exhaustive account but also needs to be trimmed down in volume, focusing only on the important aspects of the life of an iconic leader.

How critics view the book
Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times writes, that the biography is "a dreary slog of a read: a bloated, tedious and — given its highly intemperate epilogue — ill-considered book that is in desperate need of editing, and way more exhausting than exhaustive."
 
Carlos Lozada of The Washington Post writes, "He (David J Garrow) tells us how Obama lived, and explores the calculations he made in the decades leading up to his winning the presidency... "Rising Star" is exhaustive, but only occasionally exhausting."
 
USA Today 's Ray Locker wrote in his review, "Each page crackles with the strength of his (David Garrow's) research, and the footnotes groan with great detail. It's a prodigious work, and one that will provide the foundation for any serious Obama biographer in the future... For all its length and heft, however, Rising Star lacks the same kind of sense of place and time that other presidential biographers."
 

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Comments

Akshita Pandey LILAVATI BAI PODAR (A)-SCRUZ

Truly, Barack Obama was a great personality. I would love to read his autobiography.

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