DREAMING OF A FATHER:

The many details that Maraniss has unearthed about Obama fall into two main categories: first, Obama's childhood circumstances were more emotionally difficult than he has made them out to be; second, his narrative of finding a comfortable, lasting cultural identity by embracing his African Americanness seems too pat. Barack Obama, Sr., though brilliant and magnetic, comes across as a real horror-show in Maraniss's account. Although he and the president's mother were officially married for a few years, it sounds as if they never lived together as husband and wife. When Barack Sr. was still in Hawaii after his son was born, he didn't even acknowledge to his friends that he had started a new family. (He already had a family back in Kenya, whom he hadn't told his wife in Hawaii about.) He may have been unfaithful to and physically abusive of Stanley Ann Dunham, as he was with his next wife, Ruth. He made no effort to provide for his Hawaiian son in any way, and when he returned to Kenya his life was a series of disasters because he was a deeply unreliable alcoholic. The auto accident that killed him in 1982, at about the same age the president was when he was elected, was merely the last in a long string of drunk-driving incidents.

The grandparents who mainly raised Obama were drinkers--in his interview with Maraniss, Obama casually refers to the grandmother who was the rock of his childhood as an alcoholic. Stanley Dunham, his grandfather, whom he strikingly resembles physically, was a salesman who had gone from mainly ebullient to mainly defeated by the time Obama was a teenager. Obama's mother was a remarkably determined and independent person who, under difficult circumstances, built a significant life for herself as an anthropologist in Indonesia, but Maraniss insistently points out what Obama himself was too diplomatic to say outright in Dreams from My Father: she consistently decided, from the time he was about ten, to structure her life so that she spent almost no time with him, and there is some evidence that he sensed this and resented it deeply. 

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