While Midknight Review is not excited about The Amateur, we encourage the reading of Barack Obama,

 Publication Date: June 19, 2012

Publisher's comments:  "From one of our preeminent journalists and modern historians comes the epic story of Barack Obama and the world that created him.    In Barack Obama: The Story, David Maraniss has written a deeply reported generational biography teeming with fresh insights and revealing information, a masterly narrative drawn from hundreds of interviews, including with President Obama in the Oval Office, and a trove of letters, journals, diaries, and other documents."

While Midknight Review is not excited about The Amateur, we encourage the reading of  Barack Obama, the book.   His early life has been a well kept secret.  David Maraniss has done a wonderful job in giving us details from the life of a younger Obama,  one who felt confused as to his role in life.  

Maureen Dowd reviews a portion of this book with these words: 

Maraniss’s book depicts Obama on an intense odyssey of self-discovery, moving toward defining himself less as a half-white man with white girlfriends than as a black man who wanted to be part of a black   community.

His New York girlfriend, Genevieve Cook, told Maraniss that Obama confessed to her that “he felt like an impostor. Because he was so white. There was hardly a black bone in his body.” When she predicted that his future might be with a black woman — “That lithe, bubbly, strong black lady is waiting somewhere!” she wrote in her journal — he told her “he doubted there were any black women he would feel truly comfortable with. I would tell him, ‘No, she is out there.’ ”  He wanted to get out of the corporate world he found so distasteful — he described himself as “a spy behind enemy lines” — and reimagine himself as a politician. . . . . . . Cook [one of Obama's white girl friends - blog editor] told Maraniss that she thought Obama’s desire to “play out a superhero life” was “a very strong archetype in his personality.”

Genevieve Cook.
Was Michelle his
only and first
black girlfriend? 

Understand that Midknight Review has a "source" policy in which we use accepted materials from both the Left and the Right,  materials that are - generally speaking - accepted by all as to statements of facts.  In fact,  as the editor,  I use as much Leftist generated information as possible;  best to defeat the enemy with their own words.    

This book, Barack Obama,  is written by a well received journalist,  David Maraniss, an associate editor with the Leftist Washington Post.  Even those on the Left will have problems rejecting the facts in this book.  No one is putting forth the idea that this is another "hit piece" on Obama.  

If you want more of an insight into the convoluted world of this man,  raised as a privileged white boy, but,  fully aware of his appearance and embedded with an evolving desire to be black, read this book.