Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill.
Speaks during the ground breaking ceremony for the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, Monday, Nov. 13, 2006. (AP Photo/Lawrence Jackson)

Barack Obama was born in Hawaii on August 4th, 1961. His father, Barack Obama Sr., was born and raised in a small village in Kenya, where he grew up herding goats with his own father, who was a domestic servant to the British.

Barack’s mother, Ann Dunham, grew up in small-town Kansas. Her father worked on oil rigs during the Depression, and then signed up for World War II after Pearl Harbor, where he marched across Europe in Patton’s army. Her mother went to work on a bomber assembly line, and after the war, they studied on the G.I. Bill, bought a house through the Federal Housing Program, and moved west to Hawaii.

It was there, at the University of Hawaii, where Barack’s parents met. His mother was a student, and his father had won a scholarship that allowed him to leave Kenya and pursue his dreams in America.

Barack’s father eventually returned to Kenya, and Barack grew up with his mother in Hawaii, and for a few years in Indonesia. Later, he moved to New York, where he graduated from Columbia University in 1983.

Remembering the values of empathy and service that his mother taught him, Barak put law school and corporate life on hold after college and moved to Chicago in 1985, where he became a community organizer with a church-based group seeking to improve living conditions in poor neighborhoods plagued with crime and high unemployment.

The group had some success, but Barack had come to realize that in order to truly improve the lives of people in that community and other communities, he needed the skills that only a more professional education could offer.

He went on to earn his law degree from Harvard in 1991, where he became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. Soon after, he returned to Chicago to practice as a civil rights lawyer and teach constitutional law. Finally, his advocacy work led him to run for the Illinois State Senate, where he served for seven years.

In 2003, Barack launched his improbable race for the United States Senate. Even with many primary contenders, an imported Republican challenger and a budget six times smaller than his opponent’s, Barack won a landslide victory. Even then, he stood out alone among the major candidates, opposing the war in Iraq.

As a US Senator, Barack has continued to work on the issues that represent the ideals and aspirations of so many. He’s helped pass major measures that combat the international trafficking of nuclear weapons, promote the use of alternative fuels, and open up the budget process to greater public scrutiny. In all of these efforts, he’s brought Democrats and Republicans together for the common good.

Above all his accomplishments and experiences, Barack is most proud and grateful for his family. His wife, Michelle, and his two daughters, Malia, 8, and Sasha, 5, live on Chicago’s South Side where they attend Trinity United Church of Christ.

The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
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by Barack Obama

ISBN: 0307237699
Pub. Date: October 2006
Format: Hardcover, 320pp
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group

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"A government that truly represents these Americans--that truly serves these Americans--will require a different kind of politics. That politics will need to reflect our lives as they are actually lived. It won’t be pre-packaged, ready to pull off the shelf. It will have to be constructed from the best of our traditions and will have to account for the darker aspects of our past. We will need to understand just how we got to this place, this land of warring factions and tribal hatreds. And we’ll need to remind ourselves, despite all our differences, just how much we share: common hopes, common dreams, a bond that will not break." from The Audacity of Hope

In July 2004, Barack Obama electrified the Democratic National Convention with an address that spoke to Americans across the political spectrum. One phrase in particular anchored itself in listeners’ minds, a reminder that for all the discord and struggle to be found in our history as a nation, we have always been guided by a dogged optimism in the future, or what Senator Obama called "the audacity of hope."

Now, in The Audacity of Hope, Senator Obama calls for a different brand of politics -- a politics for those weary of bitter partisanship and alienated by the "endless clash of armies" we see in congress and on the campaign trail; a politics rooted in the faith, inclusiveness, and nobility of spirit at the heart of "our improbable experiment in democracy." He explores those forces -- from the fear of losing to the perpetual need to raise money to the power of the media -- that can stifle even the best-intentioned politician. He also writes, with surprising intimacy and self-deprecating humor, about settling in as a senator, seeking to balance the demands of public service and family life, and his own deepening religious commitment.

At the heart of this book is Senator Obama’s vision of how we can move beyond our divisions to tackle concrete problems. He examines the growing economic insecurity of American families, the racial and religious tensions within the body politic, and the transnational threats -- from terrorism to pandemic -- that gather beyond our shores. And he grapples with the role that faith plays in a democracy -- where it is vital and where it must never intrude. Underlying his stories about family, friends, members of the Senate, even the president, is a vigorous search for connection: the foundation for a radically hopeful political consensus.

A senator and a lawyer, a professor and a father, a Christian and a skeptic, and above all a student of history and human nature, Senator Obama has written a book of transforming power. Only by returning to the principles that gave birth to our Constitution, he says, can Americans repair a political process that is broken, and restore to working order a government that has fallen dangerously out of touch with millions of ordinary Americans. Those Americans are out there, he writes --- "waiting for Republicans and Democrats to catch up with them."

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
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ISBN: 1400082773
Pub. Date: August 2004
Format: Paperback, 480pp
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group

In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father-a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man-has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey-first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother's family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father's life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance.

Obama: From Promise to Power

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by David Mendell

Hardcover: 416 pages
Publisher: Amistad; 1 edition (August 14, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0060858206

Book Description
David Mendell has covered Obama since the beginning of his campaign for the Senate and as a result enjoys far–reaching access to the new Senator––both his professional and personal life. He uses this access to paint a very intimate portrait of Obama and his life pre and post Senate, including Obama's new status as a sex symbol now that going into a crowd to shake hands with constituents carries the added concern of being groped by women, and the toll this has had on his marriage. Mendell also describes the dirty tactics sanctioned by Obama––who has steeped his image and reputation on the ideals of clean politics and good government –– to win his Senate seat by employing David Axelrod, a Chicago–based political consultant (consultant to the John Edwards's campaign) with what the author describes as "an appetite for the Big Kill."

Mendell also positions Barack Obama as in fact the Savior of a fumbling Democratic party, who is potentially orchestrating a career in Senate to guarantee him at the very least a vice presidential nod, if not a nod for the top job in 2008. The dream ticket would be Hilary Clinton–Barack Obama given his reception at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. Because he enjoys popularity among Whites (particularly suburban White women) and Blacks, it might not be such a far–fetched idea.

About the Author
David Mendell, a native of Cincinnati, Ohio, began writing about urban issues and politics for the Chicago Tribune in 1998. During his eight-year tenure at the Tribune, Mendell has also covered breaking national news including the Columbine High School shootings and the Seattle riots spurred by meetings of the World Trade Organization. He lives in Oak Park, Illinois.

A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited about Obama And Why He Can’t Win
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by Shelby Steele

Hardcover: 160 pages
Publisher: Free Press (December 4, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1416559175
ISBN-13: 978-1416559177
Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.1 x 0.9 inches

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In Shelby Steele's beautifully wrought and thought provoking new book, A Bound Man, the award-winning and bestselling author of The Content of Our Character attests that Senator Barack Obama's groundbreaking quest for the highest office in the land is fast becoming a galvanizing occasion beyond mere presidential politics, one that is forcing a national dialogue on the current state of race relations in America. Says Steele, poverty and inequality usually are the focus of such dialogues, but Obama's bid for so high an office pushes the conversation to a more abstract level where race is a politics of guilt and innocence generated by our painful racial history -- a kind of morality play between (and within) the races in which innocence is power and guilt is impotence.

Steele writes of how Obama is caught between the two classic postures that blacks have always used to make their way in the white American mainstream: bargaining and challenging. Bargainers strike a "bargain" with white America in which they say, I will not rub America's ugly history of racism in your face if you will not hold my race against me. Challengers do the opposite of bargainers. They charge whites with inherent racism and then demand that they prove themselves innocent by supporting black-friendly policies like affirmative action and diversity.

Steele maintains that Senator Obama is too constrained by these elaborate politics to find his own true political voice. Obama has the temperament, intelligence, and background -- an interracial family, a sterling education -- to guide America beyond the exhausted racial politics that now prevail. And yet he is a Promethean figure, a bound man.

Says Steele, Americans are constrained by a racial correctness so totalitarian that we are afraid even to privately ask ourselves what we think about racial matters. Like Obama, most of us find it easier to program ourselves for correctness rather than risk knowing and expressing what we truly feel. Obama emerges as a kind of Everyman in whom we can see our own struggle to accept and honor what we honestly feel about race. In A Bound Man, Steele makes clear the precise constellation of forces that bind Senator Obama, and proposes a way for him to break these bonds and find his own voice. The courage to trust in one's own careful judgment is the new racial progress, the "way out" from the forces that now bind us all.

Related Links

Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. (Minister of Church Obama Attended)
http://authors.aalbc.com/jeremiah_wright.htm

As Obama Rises, Old Guard Civil Rights Leaders Scowl
Article - As Obama Rises, Old Guard Civil Rights Leaders Scowl

A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited about Obama And Why He Can’t Win - Book Review
http://reviews.aalbc.com/a_bound_man.htm

Obama at the Apollo Comments
http://www.thumperscorner.com/discus/messages/179/31800.html

Article - African Americans Figure Prominently in Presidential Debate
http://reviews.aalbc.com/aa_pres.htm

U.S. Senator Barack Obama Presidential Exploratory Committee
http://www.barackobama.com/
 

Barack Obama U.S. Senator for Illinois
http://obama.senate.gov/

Al Sharpton and Barack Obama Wow Democratic National Convention
Rev. Al Sharpton stole the show
http://www.nathanielturner.com/alsharptonandbarackobama.htm

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713 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510
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