Barack Obama in Hawai'i and Indonesia

Whatever the final historical judgment of Obama's presidency, the very fact of it resonates globally as it signals that the United States is more in sync with the rest of the world than its power-wielding implies and is ready for the multicultural changes of the 21st century, says cultural anthropologist Sharma. He draws on his insider-outsider perspective as an immigrant, written materials by and about Obama, and interviews with family, friends, neighbors, and teachers in Hawaii and Indonesia to offer the first cultural biography of Barack Obama. . . . Sharma offers intriguing glimpses of Obama's life and a compelling argument that Obama's singular background and his election as U.S. president despite distrust of his "otherness" make him a transformative figure as the United States grapples with emerging nations and its own decline as the world's only superpower. * Booklist Online *
An enlightening account of Obama's boyhood chronicling an amazing transformation from an Indonesian slumdog ordinaire into a planetary prophet for the ages. * aalbc.com *
Sharma (culture psychology and marketing, St. Francis College, New York) provides a psycho-cultural biography of President Obama in his first 18 years in Hawai'i and Indonesia, then later on as a young man in college and afterwards on the mainland United States. Using as evidence Obama's writings along with interviews with Obama's former teachers, his half-sister, classmates in the Catholic elementary school and state elementary school (that used Muslim prayers) that Obama attended as a child in Jakarta, and interviews in the elite prep school in Honolulu he later attended, the author contends that Obama is the United State's first global president, given that his first experiences were with multiracial, multiethnic, multilinguistic people in those areas. . . . Recommended. * Choice *