By the author of the bestselling When Pride Still Mattered and the Pulitzer finalist for They Marched into Sunlight and the definitive biography of the young Bill Clinton, First in His Class, a stunning saga of the generations and geography that put Barack Obama on his path to the American presidency.Meticulously reported by one of our pre-eminent journalists, based on hundreds of interviews, the real stories of Obama's disparate forebears and his early life explain as never before the forces that shaped him. Along the way is a story of passions, vain ambitions, survival and love. There is a sad description of his father’s, and father’s father's behavior and of their thwarted lives. Maraniss's portrayal of Obama’s mother is critical and sympathetic. He shows us Obama as a small school boy in Indonesia, eager and polite, then as a prankster adolescent, a basketball-playing good scholar. The truth is that Barack Obama Jr. began inventing and defining himself from early childhood to undergraduate at Occidental and Columbia Colleges, on to Harvard and “home” to Chicago. Maraniss evokes time and place so vividly that readers feel they are there. He corrects the record (even Obama’s recollections) as he keeps the young Obama always at the center of this adventure.