Veteran presidential biographer David Maraniss—whose Clinton tome First In His Class is considered the definitive account of young Bubba—turns his eye to the current commander in chief in Barack Obama: The Story. And though the book—compiled through interviews with Obama’s old friends and lovers—won’t hit shelves for a few more weeks, juicy revelations about Barry Obama’s pot-smoking youth have been lighting up the blogosphere. But there’s more! A lengthy Vanity Fair excerpt has already detailed the collegiate future president’s love life. From the good times with the “Choom Gang” to his first visit to Kenya, take a look at other interesting tidbits much-anticipated book............

...........Beenu Mahmood, part of a group of Obama’s friends that the future president reportedly referred to as “the Pakistanis,” recalls Barack rereading Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man over and over for a period of two to three months. Mahmood interpreted this as the Obama’sway of analyzing his own racial identity. Obama is “the most deliberate person I have ever met in terms of constructing his own identity, and his achievement was really an achievement of identity in the modern world,” Mahmood tells Maraniss in the book. “[That] was an important period for him, first the shift from not international but American, number one, and then not white, but black.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...king-more.html