Garrow on Obama

Just finished David Garrow's Rising Star.  It's only getting 3 stars on Amazon.  This piece gives a reasonable review.

It's the longest book I've read in a long time--1400+pages with footnotes and index, about 970 pages of text. Garrow seems to have talked to everyone who had significant dealings with Obama during his life up to 2004 and to everyone who remembered him. That means it's exhaustive and exhausting. Garrow vacuumed up everything, so he often reports fulsome compliments ("will be first Aftrican-American president") along with bitter feelings. After he's elected to the Senate the book speeds up a bit, ending with his election, with an epilogue which covers the presidency.

Garrow found a new lover--in addition to the two previous biographers had already identified, one from Obama's days as an organizer in Chicago.  He seems to have had a steady if not necessarily totally monogamous relationship at Occidental, in New York City, and then in Chicago before law school, before finally meeting and marrying Michelle after law school. As far as Garrow can tell he's been a faithful husband, surprisingly so in light of the atmosphere in Springfield, IL when he was a state senator.

Obama seems to have evolved into a person who greatly impressed most people he met and worked with, antagonizing a few along the way and leaving in his wake some more with ambivalence. Garrow sees the mature Obama as very ambitious and very private, rarely allowing people to see his core, sometimes leaving them with the feeling of being used or abandoned.  As his biographer Garrow doesn't penetrate that far, never resolving the apparent conflict between Obama's famous "cool" and his nicotine addiction.

Garrow''s extensive research turns up no skeletons in the closet, at most some evidence of of a toe or two of clay.  He does debunk anti-Obama stories popular on the right, not so much explicitly but by laying out the detailed sequence: these include the relationships with Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn, with Rev. Wright, and developer Tony Rezko.  As his fame grew, he minimized his ties to all of these.  Garrow notes the shading of the truth, but doesn't frame it as hiding lurid secrets, just a politician doing a hedge.

Garrow won a Pulitzer for his bio of M. L. King; he didn't win another for this book.