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America's Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance"e

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It boggles the mind that any man could propel from virtual anonymity to such dizzying heights of fame, adoration, and power as Barack Obama has done without anybody making a serious effort to explore his background, biography, and motivations. This book, by the controversial science blogger Steve Sailer, accomplishes just that. Be forewarned that it's not a partisan screed against Obama, and those eager to read about skullduggery and conspiracies will want their money back. This is a mature and thoughtful (but very accessible) analysis of our president's intellectual and ideological foundations.

Enthusiasm for Barack Obama in the popular media is universal, but the adoration is directed at a cipher. This is unfortunate, because there is a real man, now president, of whom almost nothing is known.

Steve Sailer's book tosses a much needed bucket of cold water into this warm and fuzzy atmosphere. Sailer describes his book as fundamentally "a debate between Obama and Obama's own autobiography", Dreams from my Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. Sailer does the analysis the media should have delivered before the election, untangling the myth from the man and presenting a vision of what one might expect from an Obama presidency.

Sailer has never been shy about stirring up controversy, and this book is no exception. However, Sailer is an analyst, not a polemicist. He doesn't engage in controversy from a perverse love of conflict, but because he follows the evidence - even if it leads to an unpopular conclusion. The sobriety of his analysis is refreshing in the current atmosphere of hysterical condemnation from the right and hysterical adulation from the left.

For those interested in a grown-up's take on Obama, Sailer's book is the best (sadly, the only) book available.

Steve Sailer has been writing wonderfully informative and convincing articles and blog-postings about Barack Obama's story and character for many months now. Whatever you think about Obama politically, he's a fascinating creature, and Sailer's musings about him have often reminded me of the kind of deep character explorations that great novels sometimes provide. It has been some of the most daring and stimulating writing that I've run across on the web in the last year. Great that Sailer has pulled together his research and thoughts into a book -- it's the most persuasive account of Obama's character that I've yet run into.

Steve Sailer is a lot more interesting than Barrack Obama - more intelligent too. This is his first book. He is a hyper-prolific writer but mostly on the Web. He probably writes half again as much as say Ann Coulter, but she cranks out her best selling books and only posts one column a week on the web. Sailer writes the equivalent of three to five columns a week, but no books until this one.

He is highly controversial because he writes about race a good deal. He has a quantitative background from his former career in market research. So his web articles often result from some original statistical observation or analysis. However this book is not quantitative.

Nor is it based on "investigative reporter" material. Sailer did not fly to Hawaii or Pakistan or Indonesia to interview the people who knew Obama. In this slim book written during the campaign Sailer relies on a kind of literary analysis of Obama's two autobiographies - but principally "Dreams From My Father". Normally this wouldn't be enough. Normally, you could just read the original and learn all you wanted.

So why should you want to read a book about Obama from someone who never interviewed him or who had never worn out a lot of shoe leather tracking down his friends and acquaintences? Why listen to a guy from LA who has no contacts on the Hill?

The first reason is that no one else has bothered to write this book. And why should it be that s no one else has analyzed "Dreams"?

Race.

"Dreams From My Father" is a race book. It details Obama's life long obssession with race and his resentments about race. During the campaign Obama tried to appear to be post-racial. He portrayed himself as a healer. Nobody wanted to point out that he harbored deep bitterness over race issues in the manner of Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. But he did, and it was all there for anyone to see in his own hand. Only Steve Sailer, one of the few American writers who has made a career of discussing race candidly could deal with this topic.

Today Obama's effect on race relations is not so much a mystery as it was last year during the campaign. His White House is today embroiled in the Rush Limbaugh attempt to buy a piece of a football team. This has blown up into a race issue. Last year many would have expected Obama to be the agent for calm and forgiveness. This year Obama the office holder rather than Obama the office seeker, encourages Al Sharpton's rhetoric. Obama stirs the pot. The Obama White House seems quick to label every policy criticism another form of white racism.

This White House's race pugnacity was not expected by most people. If they had read Sailer's book they wouldn't be surprised.

I always enjoy Steve Sailer's movie reviews in The American Conservative. Although some find his "reductionist" method of analyzing movies to be rather dull, I find it fascinating to deal with the topic of why things happen in movies the way that they do, and how an actor or director's experiences and background affect the message they send. Certainly, a boring, confusing, or otherwise annoying movie can be made much more interesting in my opinion by describing why some of the annoying conventions exist, rather than simply looking at them as blemishes on the movie. In addition, this often allows Sailer to bring out facts about human nature and to connect everything to everything else, allowing for some beautiful explicatory analogies.

Another of Mr. Sailer's talents is his mastery of the written deadpan snark. He will often shoot off a phrase in his blog that, when reading it, you can just hear the "aside" tone being used as he puts down some ridiculous pretension.

All of these things can be found in his recently published work, America's Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance." In this book, he writes what is essentially an extended "Sailer-style" review of Barack Obama's Dreams from my Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.

What Sailer lays out in AHBP (as it is now commonly abbreviated), is the thesis that Barack Obama, far from being a uniting postracial figure like Tiger Woods, has actually spent much of his life worrying about being "authentically black." Moreover, he seems to aspire to all of the traits that have made it difficult for many black politicians to rise to prominence outside of the black community, namely, a desire to take from whitey and give to the black community, a resentment of the white community, and a failure to seriously consider that any of the problems of the black community are self-inflicted.

What makes this book a good read is that it continuously references back to its original thesis, and it keeps on topic with the terse efficiency that teachers ask for most written essays. Reading AHBP, one does not get lost in a lot of irrelevant tangents, and the biographical backbone moves forward in time relentlessly, allowing one to see Obama as he develops.

Surprisingly to those who do not know Sailer, and unsurprisingly to those who do, Sailer shows little animosity toward Obama, despite a great deal of skepticism about his claims. Sailer even acknowledges the possibility that Obama has mellowed over the years, although he also points out Obama's tendency to shy away from being too explicit about his philosophy and its obvious implication: that Obama is not being entirely forthright with his Presidential campaign rhetoric. Moreover, Sailer does not blame Obama's issues on his race itself, rather, as much as anything they are the products of his white, racially self-loathing hippy mother.

Sailer also manages to bring in a lot of issues about which he has previously discussed in his blog, in much the same way that person writing his final paper for a class will refer back to various individual lessons from the class. This effect beautifully demonstrates the relevance of various social facts with which his readers are familiar. These include: African "big man" syndrome, the effects of welfare, white "anti-racist" pretensions, the social implications of interracial relationships, and much, much more.

Finally, here are two quotes, one demonstrating Sailer's his ability to use analogies, and the other his deadpan sarcasm.

"In contrast to John McCain, who is at his best shooting the breeze off the top of his head with the reporters privileged enough to travel on his campaign bus, but whose formal speeches are strained affairs, Obama's strong suit is delivering carefully rewritten and rehearsed orations. Obama is Daniel Day'Lewis, making one monumental film every few years, to McCain`s Regis Philbin, winging it on TV daily for decades."

"Of course, ever since he left community organizing in the slums of Chicago for Harvard Law School, Obama's solution to his failing to solve racial challenges he has set himself has been to get himself promoted."

This book is excellent. Everyone should buy a copy.

That is all.

We've been learning about Barack Obama for more than two years now, but answer this question honestly: Do you have a clear sense of who this guy really is? I get Bush. Clinton, too. But Mr. Obama is a mystery.

Steve Sailer has seen him more clearly than any other author, and he did it by dissecting Obama's Dreams of My Father line by line. Dreams is very personal and reflective, but Obama wrote it in a style that is hard to penetrate. Sailer, on the other hand, is crystal clear--the book just zips by. After you've finished, I guarantee that the President won't seem so mysterious. You might be pleased. You might be horrified, but you will definitely not be bored.

I got interested in this book, America's Half-Blood Prince, after seeing some controversy about the author on the Web. On the premise that there's fire where there's smoke, I decided there might be something interesting here. Specifically, in other places, the author says his critics are upset when he points out well-reasoned, well-documented truths that they don't want to hear, and I wanted to see what these theoretical truths about Obama might be.

To sum up, the point of the book (written before the 2008 election) is that a President Obama would likely not focus on post-racial American unity but on continuing his work in community organizing, which the author says is just a cover for inter-racial wealth transfer. To back up this claim, the author examines Obama's first autobiography, Dreams from My Father, in an exegetical manner. The Obama he describes is one who, for no objectively good reason, became obsessed with race and his inheritance (or lack of it) from his father and uses racial conflict as a salve for his own wounded/twisted personal psychology. Not having read Obama's autobiography, I can't say whether this is a reasonable interpretation of it. Not knowing Obama, I can't say whether this is a reasonable interpretation of him.

I can say that the author's claims to pointing out truths people don't want to hear are not supported by good reasoning or good documentation in this book. I was astounded to find the author expands on Obama's own words by making comparisons to unrelated works, especially fiction, most often the John Updike novel The Coup. What was he thinking? As far as I can tell, he simply uses this technique to let others say things he does not want to say himself. I understand that the author is probably concerned about creeping censorship, but his strategy has made the book not worth the read.

In addition, the book's production was poor. The author admits that he is a sloppy writer and no English stylist, but the book is about on the level of a dashed-off blog posting. Every citation is preceded by a period and dash, which is lazy editing that verges on being offensive. If you are going to publish a product that you charge money for, it's simple decency to meet basic standards expected by the buyer. I can't imagine myself wading through another VDARE Foundation publication.

I hate giving such a low rating to someone who's willing to venture outside the socially approved narratives of our political system, but I can't justify giving more than 1.5 stars (rounded to 2).

The basic point of this book is that Barack Obama is a "race-warrior" not unlike Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. In "Dreams," Barack Obama wrote with much pathos about his quest to discover who he is and how he fits in our society. This is a common challenge for many non-white Americans. Steve Sailer would have us believe that such a man lacks patriotism and he hints that Obama is "Anti-White." Steve Sailer makes much of the association Obama has with Rev. Wright and also Bill Ayers.