As 44th president, Barack Obama's journey to the White House is anything but conventional.
Born to a Kenyan father and Kansan mother, Obama's upbringing in Hawaii and Indonesia hardly sounds like the makings of a future president. But as he ascended the political ladder as a state senator and later as senator, Obama's rough beginning turned into the start of a journey to the White House.
Tuesday on Up to Date, author and associate editor at The Washington Post David Maraniss, joins us to talk about his new biography of the president. Logging in tens of thousands of air miles to gather thousands of pages in documents, interviews, and information, Maraniss shares his own journey of crafting the biography of one of the most influential--and controversial--presidents in American history.
Maraniss' biography is titled Barack Obama: The Story
David Maraniss is an associate editor at The Washington Post. In addition to Barack Obama: The Story, Maraniss is the author of five critically acclaimed and bestselling books, When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi, First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton, They Marched Into Sunlight – War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967, Clemente – The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero, and Rome 1960: The Summer Olympics That Stirred the World. He is also the author of Into the Story: A Writer’s Journey Through Life, Politics, Sports and Loss, The Clinton Enigma and coauthor of The Prince of Tennessee: Al Gore Meets His Fate and "Tell Newt to Shut Up!" David is a three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and won the Pulitzer for national reporting in 1993 for his newspaper coverage of then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton. He also was part of The Washington Post team that won a 2008 Pulitzer for the newspaper's coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting. He has won several other notable awards for achievements in journalism, including the George Polk Award, the Dirksen Prize for Congressional Reporting, the ASNE Laventhol Prize for Deadline Writing, the Hancock Prize for Financial Writing, the Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the Frankfort Book Prize, the Eagleton Book Prize, the Ambassador Book Prize, and Latino Book Prize.
