'Barack Obama,' by David Maraniss: review Life, he writes, "is chaotic, a jumble of accidents, ambitions, misconceptions, bold intentions, lazy happenstances, and unintended consequences." A prodigiously researched and exquisitely written multigenerational account that begins in Kenya and Kansas, the book follows "Barry" from Hawaii (yes, he was born there) to Indonesia (no, he isn't a Muslim), Occidental College, Columbia University and a job as a community organizer in Chicago, and ends before Obama gets a law degree from Harvard and enters politics. A recurring theme in Obama's early life, grounded in a repetitive cycle of loss and recovery that may help explain his presidency, Maraniss argues, is his determination to escape traps, including the trap of race in America, "with its likelihood of rejection and cynicism." When Simeon Heninger, a friend at Punahou High School in Hawaii, claims that another uncharacteristic declaration, made at a party following weekend exams, that the human race would be better off if people stopped wearing clothes, revealed loneliness and pent-up anger at a society that branded him inferior because he was black, Maraniss opts for "the more plausible likelihood:" Obama may have been "so stoned that he was talking nonsense" or "trying to put the moves on an attractive woman on a Friday night." The experience of leaving and being left, of having a black African father and a white American mother and living with his grandparents, he indicates, taught Obama to adjust to uncertain circumstances, reinforced his sense of himself as an outsider and motivated him to build a more expansive "community" through public engagement. Shown a registration book his grandfather carried and a letter of recommendation designed to get his father admitted into an American college, Barack Hussein Obama stepped out of a hut and into a yard, walked toward a mango tree, fell to his knees and wept.