Barack Obama in Hawai'i and Indonesia: The Making of a Global President

(Hardback)

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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. The first 18 years of President Obama's life, from his birth in 1961 to his departure for college in 1979, were spent in Hawai'i and Indonesia. These years fundamentally shaped the traits for which the adult Obama is notedhis protean identity, his nuanced appreciation of multiple views of the same object, his cosmopolitan breadth of view, and his self-rooted "outpost" patriotism. Barack Obama in Hawai'i and Indonesia: The Making of a Global President is the first study to examine, in fascinating detail, how his early years impacted this unique leader. Existing biographies of President Obama are primarily political treatments. Here, cross-cultural psychologist and marketing consultant Dinesh Sharma explores the connections between Obama's early upbringing and his adult views of civil society, secular Islam, and globalization. The book draws on the author's on-the-ground research and extensive first-hand interviews in Jakarta; Honolulu; New York; Washington, DC; and Chicago to evaluate the multicultural inputs to Obama's character and the ways in which they prepared him to meet the challenges of world leadership in the 21st century.

Reviews

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 *

Author Bio

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.