HONOLULU, Sept. 30 /PRNewswire/ -- The Democratic candidate who could be
the next President of the United States draws his core values from Hawaii,
where he was born and raised.
A new biography of Barack Obama paints a searing portrait of his youth in
multicultural Hawaii, where shared island values made it possible for people
of different immigrant and ethnic backgrounds to live and work together.
In their book The Dream Begins: How Hawaii Shaped Barack Obama, veteran
journalists Stu Glauberman and Jerry Burris explore how Obama struggled to
find his identity as a young man of mixed race in a racially diverse
population.
Glauberman and Burris present a compelling picture of the role played by
race and ethnicity in Hawaii's quest for statehood and in the social movements
of the Seventies when Obama was a student at an elite private school.
As Obama struggled to find himself through his teen years, so too did the
dozen or more ethnic minorities that make up Hawaii's population. The Dream
Begins describes how the unfolding cultural strength of the Native Hawaiian
population was set against an emerging awareness among the state's Asian
minority groups who came to America as immigrant laborers.
The book is the first to fully explore Obama's friendship with African-
American poet and activist Frank Marshall Davis, who has been demonized as a
"Communist" by some, but lionized in Hawaii as an ardent defender of social
justice for ethnic union workers and blue-collar laborers. It was Davis who
helped shape Obama's ideals of racial equality, which would later prompt him
to become a community organizer.
Customers of Amazon.com have posted glowing reviews of this groundbreaking
book, which reveals little-known aspects of Obama's background.
U.S. Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii), who wrote the book's preface, calls
it an incisive social history of Hawaii since statehood. A friend of Obama's
parents in the early 1960s when they were students at the University of
Hawaii, Abercrombie has high praise for the way the authors have woven Obama
and Hawaii's story together, creating new insight into the Democratic
contender for the presidency.
Order a copy from:
Watermark Publishing
http://www.bookshawaii.net/
Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/Dream-Begins-Hawaii-Shaped-Barack/dp/0981508685
Barnes&Noble.com
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Dream-Begins/Stu-Glauberman/e/9780981508689/
Borders.com
http://www.borders.com/online/store/TitleDetail?sku=0981508685
SOURCE Glauberman and Burris
Stu Glauberman, +1-808-772-9288 (day); +1-808-263-8233 (evening); or Jerry
Burris, +1-808-262-4393
