‘Obama flew to the U.S. not as part of a larger student airlift, as is generally believed, but only because Mooney mentored his admission to the University of Hawaii and persuaded fellow literacy advocate Frank Laubach to help defray Obama’s expenses. This significant discovery is just one of many notable revelations in Sally Jacobs’s “The Other Barack,” but the cumulative effect of her thoroughly researched biography is deeply depressing. Jacobs, a reporter for the Boston Globe, has far outstretched all previous journalists in unearthing an impressive array of new information about Obama’s life, but her richly sourced account of how a promising young adulthood quickly descended into daily alcoholic binges and serial domestic violence paints an even more dramatically downbeat portrait than did Obama’s namesake son 16 years ago in “Dreams From My Father.” Indeed, although “The Other Barack” greatly enriches our knowledge of the elder Obama’s life, it is such a painfully disheartening narrative that some interested readers — and certainly one in particular — should avoid Jacobs’s tragic account.’
You’ve now shown TWO book reviews of the same book from two different sources.
Book review: ‘The Other Barack’ by Sally H. Jacobs
By David J. Garrow,