Maraniss: It Is Hawaii That Made Obama's Rise Possible

David Maraniss, the sports history author, turns his hand to the early background of Barack Obama and gets up close and personal with mother Ann and grandparents Madelyn and Stanley.

Hawaii involves the struggles of a teenage hapa at Punahou School who wanted nothing more than to be a professional basketball player. It is about his extraordinary mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, deeply loving if frequently absent. While politicians burnish their histories by laying claim to early years of community work and lives of public service, she was the real deal, devoting her career, unsung and underpaid, to helping poor women make their way in the modern world.

It is about his mysterious father, Barack Hussein Obama, an imperious if alluring voice gone distant and then missing. It is about his grandparents, Madelyn and Stan Dunham, Toot and Gramps, the white couple with whom he lived for most of his teenage years, she practical and determined, he impulsive, hokey, well-intentioned and, by his grandson's account, burdened with the desperate lost hopes of a Willy Loman-style salesman.