Distinguishing itself from the mass of political biographies of Barack Obama, this first interdisciplinary study of Obama's Indonesian and Hawai'ian years examines their effect on his adult character, political identity, and global world-view.
Acknowledgments Prologue 1 Transformation of the American Mind 2 Origin Stories 3 Women Who Shaped Obama 4 Global Schooling in Jakarta 5 A New Spring in Hawai'i 6 Hybrid Identity on the Mainland 7 Obama's Mythic Dreams 8 The Obama World 9 Reimagining the American Dream List of References Index About the Author
Dinesh Sharma, PhD, is a cultural psychologist and senior fellow at the Institute for International and Cross-Cultural Research at St. Francis College, Brooklyn Heights, NY.
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.
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