I heard about this book through an interview I saw with the author Sally Jacobs, a veteran reporter for the Boston Globe. The book is titled "The Other Barack," but it was the subtitle that intrigued me the most--"The Bold and Reckless Life of President Obama's Father." After just a few pages, I knew this biography was going to be more than just another whimsical trip down memory lane.
According to the book, Jacobs left the Boston Globe to complete the research necessary to write as factually accurate a record of Barack Obama, Sr. as possible. She spent two and a half years interviewing, record checking, and trips to both stateside locations and overseas trips to Kenya to uncover the needed details that would accurately portray not only Obama, Sr., but the Obama family, as well. What resulted was a somewhat flattering, yet gritty and even embarrassing portrait of a man who dared to dream big dreams, and yet for very obvious reasons fell short of nearly every one.
SPOILER ALERT: There may be information about the contents of this book beyond this point that some readers may not want to know. If so, stop now or continue reading at your own risk.
As the subtitle implies, Jacobs pulls no punches in the book. She writes about a man, born in the mid-1930s in a Luo tribe in Kenya, one ruled by a patriarchal tribal culture, with polygamist Luo traditions, and dominated by a father's intense and often cruel treatment of his family members, especially the boys. The author spends the first part of the book providing the reader with a detailed history of the Obama family tree. Although she does a good job of interpreting the unusual Kenyan names and phraseology, I found myself creating a scorecard to keep track of the large number of important and less important characters. In my opinion, you really need to keep track of who is who to fully appreciate some of what Jacobs has written. This really came in handy, especially later in the book.
Although illiteracy was rampant in Kenya, the Obama family recognized that education was the key to success, and an advanced education (high school and above) was seen as essential, mostly for the boys. Attending one of the best schools (high school equivalent) Jacobs describes Obama, Sr. as an extremely bright, quick-witted yet often loud and arrogant boy who, in line with Luo tradition,thought of himself as the best and brightest in the school, whether he was or not, and wasn't too timid to tell anyone that fact, even his teachers. Extremely adept at mathematics, it was this arrogance and a loose tongue that led to his dismissal from school without graduating. Later, Obama, Sr. would meet an American, who saw real promise in Obama and assisted him in furthering his education in the U.S., and was admitted to the University of Hawaii, even though he lacked the needed academic achievement for admission.
According to Jacobs, it was in college, away from his first wife and family, where Obama begins to reveal his moral character, or in his case, his lack of moral character. Using his boisterous, yet often charming demeanor, Obama, Sr. spends most of his out of class time womanizing, drinking heavily and dominating every conversations with his college associates. When it benefits himself, Obama, Sr. freely withholds pertinent facts and freely lies whenever he wants to, and whenever he thinks it will benefit him. Obama also marries a classmate (his second wife) who will later give birth to Barack H. Obama, Jr. Jacobs often attributes his polygamist behavior by chalking it up to Obama's Luo tribal customs. Not surprisingly, the University of Hawaii, not pleased with Obama's behavior, forced him to leave at the end of his senior year without a diploma.
Obama is admitted to Harvard, again with the assistance of a U.S. acquaintance. Again, he impresses his friends and professors with his intelligence, skilled analysis in mathematics and grasp of economics, but his behavioral problems soon catch up with him again, which cause him to again spin out of control. Even though he completes his studies at Harvard, minus his doctoral thesis, the school, along with the INS, forced him out of Harvard without conferring his PhD and this time out of the U.S. altogether. Obama returns to Kenya, leaving his second wife pregnant in Hawaii, who eventually divorces him.
The rest of the book focuses on Obama's attempts to fulfill his dreams of playing a significant role in the newly independent Kenya. However, he spends the next two decades being hired and fired from numerous government jobs, always due to his abusive and debauched lifestyle. He continued his drunkenness, on and off the job, and his womanizing, which led to more wives (4 or 5?) and more children (5, 6 or 7?). His attitude about his womanizing is described by Ellen Frost as follows:
"Ellen Frost, who experienced Obama's charm first hand, describes his aggressive come-on to women as a kind of compulsion. `As Obama says it, it was natural for a man to collect many women. That was the natural order of things.'"
Nearing the end of the book, Jacob's constant descriptions of Obama's downward spiral into a jobless, penniless, wifeless and friendless existence, as well as his daily drunken stupors, gets a little monotonous, but I suppose it was necessary to accurately describe his life and most of all his failure to reach nearly all of his important personal goals. This brilliant, but tragic figure's life ends abruptly with yet another tragic event. The reason for his death is, and will continue to be debated. The easy answer is it was an accident. However, if you look closely at Obama's life, as Jacob did, it certainly could have been any for number reasons.
Finally, one minor point. At the end of the book, and after Jacobs had so dogedly scraped away the varnish on Obama's life to reveal the good, the bad, and the ugly, she does something in the last few pages that completely surprised me. Up to this point she had been so evenhanded, revealing how Obama was the source of his own calamities. Yet she seemed to draw back from that position at the very end, making the following contradictory statement to seemingly justify one of Obama's major failures.
"Obama came within inches of the Harvard doctoral degree that he so coveted, the academic jewel that would have served as the bedrock for the career he envisioned. But Harvard denied him that."
Earlier in the book, Jacobs paints a clear picture that it was Obama's own gross behavior, in class and out of class, that motivated Harvard to come to their decision to remove him. His lying, drinking, womanizing and disruptive behavior had become intolerable. Yet they still authorized him to continue working on his doctoral thesis at home in Kenya and submit it later to Harvard for consideration, just like any other thesis. Obama returned to Kenya a bitter, angry man and makes little, if any attempt to complete his thesis. In this regard, Jacobs seemed to have an unexpected weak moment at this point in the book by trying to justify Obama's failures, blaming them on the school. Yet, what Harvard did was not inconsistent with what had resulted in most of the previous important ventures in Obama's life. Why blame someone else now? According to Jacobs, Obama's desire above all else was to become a BIG MAN, and it can be argued that in some sense early on and for a short time he was. However, when you lie over and over again, pretending to be someone you're not, someone in a position more important than yours, the truth will usually catch up with you. And after all, considering what I understood Jacobs to say earlier in her book, Obama, Sr. shouldn't have even been admitted to the University of Hawaii, let alone Harvard.
I still applaud Sally Jacobs for her extraordinary work in tracking down the pieces of Obama's life. This book is well written, well organized, right down to the excellent set of black and white photos included in the book. At times, parts of the biography seemed a bit redundant, with the same information and events being mentioned on numerous occasions throughout the book. However, considering the large cast of characters in this biography, it could very well have been done to refresh the reader's memory of past events that now have a present relevant application. That being said, Jacobs did a great job with this book. One that I'm confident will be referenced over and over again when the name an life of Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. is mentioned.
