Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media by Ishmael Reed

Bestselling Books on Barack Obama, March 2010

The top-selling books about Barack Obama published in 2010 (as of 4/1/2010).

1. Conservative Victory: Defeating Obama’s Radical Agenda by Sean Hannity
   (Harper Paperbacks, 03/30/10, Paperback)
   

   Barack Obama and his radical team of self-professed socialists, fringe activists, and others are trying to remake the American way of life. They have used their new Democratic majority to launch an alarming assault on our capitalist system — while abandoning the war on terror, undermining our national security, and weakening our position in the eyes of our enemies. The “candidate of change” is threatening to change our country irreparably, and for the worse — if we don’t act to stop him now. Sean Hannity has been sounding the alarms about Obama and his agenda from the start. Now — in his first new book in six years — he issues a stirring call to action. Hannity surveys all the major Obama players — from the president’s affiliation with radical theology to his advisers’ history of Marxist activism, repression of the media, support for leftist dictators, and worse. He exposes their resulting campaign to dismantle the American free-market system and forfeit our national sovereignty. But he draws on the examples of Ronald Reagan and the GOP’s Contract with America to show how conservatives can unite behind this country’s most cherished principles and act now to get America back on the right track — while we still can.

    

2. Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime by John Heilemann
   (Harper, 01/01/10, Hardcover)
   

   In Game Change, John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, two of the country’s leading political reporters, use their unrivaled access to pull back the curtain on the Obama, Clinton, McCain, and Palin campaigns. Based on hundreds of interviews with the people who lived the story, Game Change is a reportorial tour de force that reads like a fast-paced novel. Character-driven and dialogue-rich, replete with extravagantly detailed scenes, it’s an intimate portrait of some of the most powerful and fascinating figures in American life — the occasionally shocking, often hilarious, ultimately definitive account of the campaign of a lifetime.

    

3. Obama Zombies: How the Liberal Machine Brainwashed My Generation by Jason Mattera
   (Threshold Editions, 03/23/10, Hardcover)
   

   In 2008, Barack Obama lobotomized a generation. For an entire year, otherwise clear-thinking members of the most affluent, over-educated, information-drenched generation in American history fell prey to the most expensive, hi-tech, laser-focused marketing assault in presidential campaign history. Twitter messages were machine-gunned to cell phones at mach speed. Facebook and MySpace groups spread across the Internet like digital fire. YouTube videos featuring celebrities ricocheted across the globe and into college students’ in-boxes with devastating regularity. All the while, the mega-money-raising engine whirred like a slot machine stuck on jackpot. The result: an unthinking mass of young voters marched forward to elect the most radical and untested president in U.S. history. Recognized as one of the country’s top young conservative activists by Human Events, Jason Mattera created an internet sensation with ambush video interviews that exposed clueless young liberals and cunning Democratic officials. Now he reveals the jaw-dropping lengths Barack Obama and his allies in Hollywood, Washington, and Academia went to in order to transform a legion of iPod-listening, MTV-watching followers into a winning coalition that threatens to become a long-lasting political realignment. Obama Zombies uncovers the true, behind-the-scenes story of the methods and tactics the Obama campaign unleashed on youth culture. Through personal interviews and meticulous original research, Mattera explains why conservatism’s future rests upon jolting the young masses from their slumber, yanking out their earphones, and sparking a countercultural conservative battle against the rise of the ignorant Left. The lesson from 2008 is crystal clear: When true conservatives run away, Obama zombies come out to play.

    

4. That’s No Angry Mob, That’s My Mom: Team Obama’s Assault on Tea-Party, Talk-Radio Americans by Michael Graham
   (Regnery Press, 03/23/10, Hardcover)
   

   Responsible. Independent. Hard-working. These are qualities which used to define Americans. But now we’re a nation of whiners, blamers, and excuse-makers. So says Michael Graham – radio talk show host, former GOP campaign consultant, and journalist — in his new book, That’s No Angry Mob, That’s My Mom. That’s No Angry Mob, That’s My Mom taps into the frustration and anxiety felt by hundreds of thousands of taxpayers at Tea Parties nationwide. Frustration that the government is taking over our lives; punishing success while rewarding failure; and fostering a society of Americans who don’t take responsibility for their actions and then expect the government — and their fellow citizens — to pick up the bill. Graham, known for his searing wit and controversial comments, also explains who the tea party “activists” really are: ordinary, everyday citizens pushed into action by the threat of higher taxes and increased government intrusion. Tackling everything from the economy and education to health care and the housing market, Graham argues that it’s up to us to take control back from the government bureaucrats and to restore the home-spun values of hard work, fair play, and individual responsibility. That’s No Angry Mob, That’s My Mom shows us how.

    

5. Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack by Marc A. Thiessen
   (Regnery Press, 01/18/10, Hardcover)
   

   White House speechwriter Marc Thiessen was locked in a secure room and given access to the most sensitive intelligence when he was tasked to write President George W. Bush’s 2006 speech explaining the CIA’s interrogation program and why Congress should authorize it. Few know more about these CIA operations than Thiessen, and in his new book, Courting Disaster, he documents just how effective the CIA’s interrogations were in foiling attacks on America, penetrating al-Qaeda’s high command, and providing our military with actionable intelligence. Thiessen also shows how reckless President Obama has been in shutting down the CIA’s program and releasing secret documents that have aided our enemies. Courting Disaster proves:How the CIA program thwarted specific deadly attacks against the U.S.Why “enhanced interrogation” was not torture by any reasonable legal or moral standardHow the information gained by “enhanced interrogation” could not have been acquired any other wayHow President Obama’s actions since taking office have left America much more vulnerable to attackIn chilling detail, Thiessen reveals how close the terrorists came to striking again, how intelligence gained from “enhanced interrogation” repeatedly stymied their plots, and how President Obama’s dismantling of this CIA program is inviting disaster for America.

    

6. The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama by David Remnick
   (Knopf, 04/06/10, Hardcover)
   

   No story has been more central to America’s history this century than the rise of Barack Obama, and until now, no journalist or historian has written a book that fully investigates the circumstances and experiences of Obama’s life or explores the ambition behind his rise. Those familiar with Obama’s own best-selling memoir or his campaign speeches know the touchstones and details that he chooses to emphasize, but now — from a writer whose gift for illuminating the historical significance of unfolding events is without peer — we have a portrait, at once masterly and fresh, nuanced and unexpected, of a young man in search of himself, and of a rising politician determined to become the first African-American president.The Bridge offers the most complete account yet of Obama’s tragic father, a brilliant economist who abandoned his family and ended his life as a beaten man; of his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, who had a child as a teenager and then built her career as an anthropologist living and studying in Indonesia; and of the succession of elite institutions that first exposed Obama to the social tensions and intellectual currents that would force him to imagine and fashion an identity for himself. Through extensive on-the-record interviews with friends and teachers, mentors and disparagers, family members and Obama himself, David Remnick allows us to see how a rootless, unaccomplished, and confused young man created himself first as a community organizer in Chicago, an experience that would not only shape his urge to work in politics but give him a home and a community, and that would propel him to Harvard Law School, where his sense of a greater mission emerged.Deftly setting Obama’s political career against the galvanizing intersection of race and politics in Chicago’s history, Remnick shows us how that city’s complex racial legacy would make Obama’s forays into politics a source of controversy and bare-knuckle tactics: his clashes with older black politicians in the Illinois State Senate, his disastrous decision to challenge the former Black Panther Bobby Rush for Congress in 2000, the sex scandals that would decimate his more experienced opponents in the 2004 Senate race, and the story — from both sides — of his confrontation with his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. By looking at Obama’s political rise through the prism of our racial history, Remnick gives us the conflicting agendas of black politicians: the dilemmas of men like Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, and Joseph Lowery, heroes of the civil rights movement, who are forced to reassess old loyalties and understand the priorities of a new generation of African-American leaders.The Bridge revisits the American drama of race, from slavery to civil rights, and makes clear how Obama’s quest is not just his own but is emblematic of a nation where destiny is defined by individuals keen to imagine a future that is different from the reality of their current lives.

    

7. Game Change CD: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime by John Heilemann
   (HarperAudio, 03/01/10, Audio CD)
   

   “This shit would be really interesting if we weren’t in the middle of it.” — Barack Obama, September 2008 In 2008, the presidential election became blockbuster entertainment. Everyone was watching as the race for the White House unfolded like something from the realm of fiction. The meteoric rise and historic triumph of Barack Obama. The shocking fall of the House of Clinton — and the improbable resurrection of Hillary as Obama’s partner and America’s face to the world. The mercurial performance of John McCain and the mesmerizing emergence of Sarah Palin. Based on hundreds of interviews with the people who lived the story, Game Change is a reportorial tour de force that reads like a fast-paced novel. Character driven and dialogue rich, replete with extravagantly detailed scenes, this is the occasionally shocking, often hilarious, ultimately definitive account of the campaign of a lifetime.

    

8. The Promise: President Obama, Year One by Jonathan Alter
   (Simon & Schuster, 05/18/10, Hardcover)
   

   Barack Obama’s inauguration as president on January 20, 2009, inspired the world. But the great promise of “Change We Can Believe In” was immediately tested by the threat of another Great Depression, a worsening war in Afghanistan, and an entrenched and deeply partisan system of business as usual in Washington. Despite all the coverage, the backstory of Obama’s historic first year in office has until now remained a mystery. In The Promise: President Obama, Year One, Jonathan Alter, one of the country’s most respected journalists and historians, uses his unique access to the White House to produce the first inside look at Obama’s difficult debut. What happened in 2009 inside the Oval Office? What worked and what failed? What is the president really like on the job and off-hours, using what his best friend called “a Rubik’s Cube in his brain”? These questions are answered here for the first time. We see how a surprisingly cunning Obama took effective charge in Washington several weeks before his election, made trillion-dollar decisions on the stimulus and budget before he was inaugurated, engineered colossally unpopular bailouts of the banking and auto sectors, and escalated a treacherous war not long after settling into office. The Promise is a fast-paced and incisive narrative of a young risk-taking president carving his own path amid sky-high expectations and surging joblessness. Alter reveals that it was Obama alone — “feeling lucky” — who insisted on pushing major health care reform over the objections of his vice president and top advisors, including his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who admitted that “I begged him not to do this.” Alter takes the reader inside the room as Obama prevents a fistfight involving a congressman, coldly reprimands the military brass for insubordination, crashes the key meeting at the Copenhagen Climate Change conference, and realizes that a Senate candidate’s gaffe about baseball in a Massachusetts special election will dash the big dream of his first year.In Alter’s telling, the real Obama is an authentic, demanding, unsentimental, and sometimes overconfident leader. He adapted to the presidency with ease and put more “points on the board” than he is given credit for, but neglected to use his leverage over the banks and failed to connect well with an angry public. We see the famously calm president cursing leaks, playfully trash-talking his advisors, and joking about even the most taboo subjects, still intent on redeeming more of his promise as the problems mount. This brilliant blend of journalism and history offers the freshest reporting and most acute perspective on the biggest story of our time. It will shape impressions of the Obama presidency and of the man himself for years to come.

    

9. Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama by Peniel E. Joseph
   (Basic Civitas Books, 01/05/10, Hardcover)
   

   The Civil Rights Movement is now remembered as a long-lost era, which came to an end along with the idealism of the 1960s. In Dark Days, Bright Nights, acclaimed scholar Peniel E. Joseph puts this pat assessment to the test, showing the 60s — particularly the tumultuous period after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act — to be the catalyst of a movement that culminated in the inauguration of Barack Obama.Joseph argues that the 1965 Voting Rights Act burst a dam holding back radical democratic impulses. This political explosion initially took the form of the Black Power Movement, conventionally adjudged a failure. Joseph resurrects the movement to elucidate its unfairly forgotten achievements.Told through the lives of activists, intellectuals, and artists, including Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton, Amiri Baraka, Tupac Shakur, and Barack Obama, Dark Days, Bright Nights will make coherent a fraught half-century of struggle, reassessing its impact on American democracy and the larger world.

    

10. The War On Success: How the Obama Agenda Is Shattering the American Dream by Tommy Newberry
    (Regnery Publishing, 01/11/10, Hardcover)
    

    Higher Taxes! Nationalized Industries! Suffocating Regulation! President Obama Has Declared War Against YouIn The War on Success, New York Times bestselling author Tommy Newberry argues that the Obama administration is not only attacking entrepreneurs and small business owners, it’s launched a fundamental assault on the very concept of success. By denigrating all the qualities that make success possible — self-reliance, ambition, hard work, the pursuit of excellence — the administration is setting the stage for Big Government to step in and “guarantee” everyone’s success through socialist-style redistribution. Brash, direct, and unafraid, The War on Success tells you what’s at stake: nothing less than the survival of the American Dream.

     

11. The Bad Science and Bad Policy of Obama’s Global Warming Agenda (Encounter Broadsides) by Roy W. Spencer
    (Encounter Books, 01/26/10, Paperback)
    

    As the U.N. moves closer to a new global warming treaty, it is time to examine the calls for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. The health and welfare of humanity has benefited from access to fossil fuels, and any drastic move to limit that access must have extraordinary evidence to support it.While alternative energy technologies will increasingly be relied upon in the face of dwindling fossil fuel supplies, leading climate researcher Dr. Roy W. Spencer argues that the free market is the best mechanism for solving the problem. In addition, Dr. Spencer addresses the new science that suggests that our modern fears of anthropogenic global warming might well be unfounded, because the climate system itself might be responsible for causing what is now known as “climate change.”

     

12. Journey of Hope: Quilts Inspired by President Barack Obama by Carolyn L. Mazloomi
    (Voyageur Press, 04/05/10, Hardcover)
    

    Journey of Hope is a gallery of more than 100 stunning quilts inspired by President Obama’s path to the White House. The works range from the poignantly abstract to the grippingly realistic and feature techniques including piecing, painting, applique, embroidery, dyeing, beading, and more. Filled with the spirit of renewal and change that fueled the Obama campaign, Journey of Hope is a celebration of our patchwork heritage and the quilter’s art.

     

13. Obama’s Radical Transformation of America: Year One (Encounter Broadsides) by Joshua Muravchik
    (Encounter Books, 02/23/10, Paperback)
    

     

14. Pinheads and Patriots: Where You Stand in the Age of Obama by Bill O’reilly
    (William Morrow, 09/01/10, Hardcover)
    

     

15. The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America by Pamela Geller
    (Threshold Editions, 07/27/10, Hardcover)
    

    A battle cry about damage being done by the current administration to the presidency and the ongoing possibility of American exceptionalism.

     

16. How the Obama Administration has Politicized Justice (Encounter Broadsides) by Andrew C McCarthy
    (Encounter Books, 01/26/10, Paperback)
    

    With the Obama Justice Department under Attorney General Eric Holder’s direction, Americans are learning what really happens when law-enforcement power is co-opted by politics.In this eye-popping Broadside, Andrew C. McCarthy shows that the biggest beneficiaries have been jihadists. For the past eight years, a group of lawyers volunteered their services to America’s enemies. Now, the Justice Department is rife with some of those same lawyers as it enhances due process for terrorists and feeds the international Left’s call for war-crimes charges against President Obama’s political adversaries. Just consider how the administration has disclosed national defense secrets during wartime or granted the 9/11 mass murderers a civilian trial. The department, moreover, is working to tighten the Democratic Party’s grip on power, ignoring the Constitution and green-lighting election fraud and abuse.

     

17. Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice by Daniel Lathrop
    (O’Reilly Media, 02/16/10, Paperback)
    

    In a world where web services can make real-time data accessible to anyone, how can the government leverage this openness to improve its operations and increase citizen participation and awareness? Through a collection of essays and case studies, leading visionaries and practitioners both inside and outside of government share their ideas on how to achieve and direct this emerging world of online collaboration, transparency, and participation. Contributions and topics include: Beth Simone Noveck, U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer for open government, “The Single Point of Failure” Jerry Brito, senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, “All Your Data Are Belong to Us: Liberating Government Data” Aaron Swartz, cofounder of reddit.com, OpenLibrary.org, and BoldProgressives.org, “When Is Transparency Useful?” Ellen S. Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, “Disrupting Washington’s Golden Rule” Carl Malamud, founder of Public.Resource.Org, “By the People” Douglas Schuler, president of the Public Sphere Project, “Online Deliberation and Civic Intelligence” Howard Dierking, program manager on Microsoft’s MSDN and TechNet Web platform team, “Engineering Good Government” Matthew Burton, Web entrepreneur and former intelligence analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, “A Peace Corps for Programmers” Gary D. Bass and Sean Moulton, OMB Watch, “Bringing the Web 2.0 Revolution to Government” Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, “Defining Government 2.0: Lessons Learned from the Success of Computer Platforms” Open Government editors: Daniel Lathrop is a former investigative projects reporter with the Seattle Post Intelligencer who’s covered politics in Washington state, Iowa, Florida, and Washington D.C. He’s a specialist in campaign finance and “computer-assisted reporting” — the practice of using data analysis to report the news. Laurel Ruma is the Gov 2.0 Evangelist at O’Reilly Media. She is also co-chair for the Gov 2.0 Expo.

     

18. The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power by David E. Sanger
    (Three Rivers Press, 01/12/10, Paperback)
    

    Readers of The New York Times know David Sanger as one of the most trusted correspondents in Washington, one to whom presidents, secretaries of state, and foreign leaders talk with unusual candor. Now, with a historian’s sweep and an insider’s eye for telling detail, Sanger delivers an urgent intelligence briefing on the world America faces. In a riveting narrative, The Inheritance describes the huge costs of distraction and lost opportunities at home and abroad as Iraq soaked up manpower, money, and intelligence capabilities. The 2008 market collapse further undermined American leadership, leaving the new president with a set of challenges unparalleled since Franklin D. Roosevelt entered the Oval Office.Sanger takes readers into the White House Situation Room to reveal how Washington penetrated Tehran’s nuclear secrets, leading President Bush, in his last year, to secretly step up covert actions in a desperate effort to delay an Iranian bomb. Meanwhile, his intelligence chiefs made repeated secret missions to Pakistan as they tried to stem a growing insurgency and cope with an ally who was also aiding the enemy — while receiving billions in American military aid. Now the new president faces critical choices: Is it better to learn to live with a nuclear Iran or risk overt or covert confrontation? Is it worth sending U.S. forces deep into Pakistani territory at the risk of undermining an unstable Pakistani government sitting on a nuclear arsenal? It is a race against time and against a new effort by Islamic extremists — never before disclosed — to quietly infiltrate Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. “Bush wrote a lot of checks,” one senior intelligence official told Sanger, “that the next president is going to have to cash.”The Inheritance takes readers to Afghanistan, where Bush never delivered on his promises for a Marshall Plan to rebuild the country, paving the way for the Taliban’s return. It examines the chilling calculus of North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il, who built actual weapons of mass destruction in the same months that the Bush administration pursued phantoms in Iraq, then sold his nuclear technology in the Middle East in an operation the American intelligence apparatus missed. And it explores how China became one of the real winners of the Iraq war, using the past eight years to expand its influence in Asia, and lock up oil supplies in Africa while Washington was bogged down in the Middle East. Yet Sanger, a former foreign correspondent in Asia, sees enormous potential for the next administration to forge a partnership with Beijing on energy and the environment. At once a secret history of our foreign policy misadventures and a lucid explanation of the opportunities they create, The Inheritance is vital reading for anyone trying to understand the extraordinary challenges that lie ahead.From the Hardcover edition.

     

19. The First: President Barack Obama’s Road to the White House as Originally Reported by Roland S. Martin by Roland S. Martin
    (Third World Press, 01/31/10, Paperback)
    

    Noted African American journalist Roland Martin takes readers back down President Barack Obama’s campaign trail in this chronological journal of events that dates back to when then Senator Obama had yet to announce his candidacy and follows him on his journey to the presidency. Martin’s charismatic writing style is presented through his in-depth analysis of the presidential campaign and Obama’s struggles and successes. Martin gives readers insight on how each important event played out in front of the nation and also shares interviews from his broadcasts, including an interview he conducted with President Obama after his win in Iowa in January 2008. Other Notable interviews include Dr. Cornel West, Rep John Lewis, Spike Lee, Maxine Waters and Michael Eric Dyson.

     

20. How Obama Has Mishandled the War on Terror (Encounter Broadsides) by Michael Bernard Mukasey
    (Encounter Books, 03/30/10, Paperback)
    

     

The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama by David Remnick

Knopf
Available 04/06/10 in Hardcover

No story has been more central to America’s history this century than the rise of Barack Obama, and until now, no journalist or historian has written a book that fully investigates the circumstances and experiences of Obama’s life or explores the ambition behind his rise. Those familiar with Obama’s own best-selling memoir or his campaign speeches know the touchstones and details that he chooses to emphasize, but now — from a writer whose gift for illuminating the historical significance of unfolding events is without peer — we have a portrait, at once masterly and fresh, nuanced and unexpected, of a young man in search of himself, and of a rising politician determined to become the first African-American president.

The Bridge offers the most complete account yet of Obama’s tragic father, a brilliant economist who abandoned his family and ended his life as a beaten man; of his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, who had a child as a teenager and then built her career as an anthropologist living and studying in Indonesia; and of the succession of elite institutions that first exposed Obama to the social tensions and intellectual currents that would force him to imagine and fashion an identity for himself. Through extensive on-the-record interviews with friends and teachers, mentors and disparagers, family members and Obama himself, David Remnick allows us to see how a rootless, unaccomplished, and confused young man created himself first as a community organizer in Chicago, an experience that would not only shape his urge to work in politics but give him a home and a community, and that would propel him to Harvard Law School, where his sense of a greater mission emerged.

Deftly setting Obama’s political career against the galvanizing intersection of race and politics in Chicago’s history, Remnick shows us how that city’s complex racial legacy would make Obama’s forays into politics a source of controversy and bare-knuckle tactics: his clashes with older black politicians in the Illinois State Senate, his disastrous decision to challenge the former Black Panther Bobby Rush for Congress in 2000, the sex scandals that would decimate his more experienced opponents in the 2004 Senate race, and the story — from both sides — of his confrontation with his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. By looking at Obama’s political rise through the prism of our racial history, Remnick gives us the conflicting agendas of black politicians: the dilemmas of men like Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, and Joseph Lowery, heroes of the civil rights movement, who are forced to reassess old loyalties and understand the priorities of a new generation of African-American leaders.

The Bridge revisits the American drama of race, from slavery to civil rights, and makes clear how Obama’s quest is not just his own but is emblematic of a nation where destiny is defined by individuals keen to imagine a future that is different from the reality of their current lives.

Right Now: A 12-Step Program For Defeating The Obama Agenda by Michael Steele

Regnery Press
Available 01/04/10 in Hardcover

What Should Conservatives Do in the Age of Obama?
Two Words: Fight Back

President Obama ran on promises of bipartisanship and centrism, but he’s delivered something else: unprecedented government borrowing and spending, unsustainable debt, and audacious attempts to usher in a colossal, overbearing government, the likes of which we’ve never seen.

In Right Now, Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele blows the whistle on the entire Obama agenda. Setting aside appeals for caution in taking on a popular president, Steele throws down the gauntlet, insisting Republicans must expose and refute the policies lying at the heart of this administration’s attempts to resurrect a discredited brand of extreme liberalism. A call to arms for grassroots America, this book argues for abandoning “conservatism-lite,” returning to core conservative principles, and launching an uncompromising campaign for limited government. The path to a Republican renaissance has already been laid, says Steele: the target is the Obama agenda, the method is active opposition, and the time is Right Now.

Bonus: Foreword by Newt Gingrich

The Preacher and the Politician: Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama, and Race in America

The Preacher and the Politician: Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama, and Race in America
by Professor Clarence E. Walker PhD (Author), Dr. Gregory D. Smithers PhD (Author)

University of Virginia Press
Available 10/15/09

Barack Obama’s inauguration as the first African American president of the United States has caused many commentators to conclude that America has entered a postracial age. The Preacher and the Politician argues otherwise, reminding us that, far from inevitable, Obama’s nomination was nearly derailed by his relationship with Jeremiah Wright, the outspoken former pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ on the South Side of Chicago. The media storm surrounding Wright’s sermons, the historians Clarence E. Walker and Gregory D. Smithers suggest, reveals that America’s fraught racial past is very much with us, only slightly less obvious.

With meticulous research and insightful analysis, Walker and Smithers take us back to the Democratic primary season of 2008, viewing the controversy surrounding Wright in the context of key religious, political, and racial dynamics in American history. In the process they expose how the persistence of institutional racism, and racial stereotypes, became a significant hurdle for Obama in his quest for the presidency.The authors situate Wright’s preaching in African American religious traditions dating back to the eighteenth century, but they also place his sermons in a broader prophetic strain of Protestantism that transcends racial categories. This latter connection was consistently missed or ignored by pundits on the right and the left who sought to paint the story in simplistic, and racially defined, terms. Obama’s connection with Wright gave rise to criticism that, according to Walker and Smithers, sits squarely in the American political tradition, where certain words are meant to incite racial fear, in the case of Obama with charges that the candidate was unpatriotic, a Marxist, a Black Nationalist, or a Muslim.

Once Obama became the Democratic nominee, the day of his election still saw ballot measures rejecting affirmative action and undermining the civil rights of other groups. The Preacher and the Politician is a concise and timely study that reminds us of the need to continue to confront the legacy of racism even as we celebrate advances in racial equality and opportunity.

News: You’ve met Bo the Dog; It’s time for Bo the Book

By LEANNE ITALIE, Associated Press Writer Leanne Italie, Associated Press Writer
Thu Apr 16, 4:07 pm ET

Now that Bo has his paws firmly planted in the White House, let the marketing begin!

A small Virginia publisher is racing out the first picture book for kids featuring the precious little Portie, with the pup on the cover in his colorful lei.

How’d they do it so fast? After all, Bo just made his official debut Tuesday.

“I would suggest that I’ve got some inside Washington information, but that wouldn’t be entirely truthful,” said the author, Naren Aryal, who is also the publisher and CEO of Mascot Books in Herndon.

Aryal said Thursday he began writing a generic Portuguese water dog story about two months ago after the Obamas seemed to have their dog choices down to a portie or a Labradoodle to accommodate first daughter Malia’s allergies.

Bo himself was inserted last minute and some fresh White House traditions like first lady Michelle Obama’s new vegetable garden were incorporated to make the book more Obama specific. The illustrations are digital, speeding up the process to get “Bo, America’s Commander in Leash” out in less than a week.

Mascot Books, with six employees, specializes in titles about school and professional sports mascots. For the Bo book, the company already has 50,000 preorders, with a healthy first print run of about 100,000 planned, Aryal said. The book, which retails for $14.95 and is aimed at kids 4 to 10, will be sold through major retailers and should be out in about five days, he said.

In the story, illustrated in-house by Danny Moore, the energetic first dog is the narrator and takes readers on a tour of the White House. He plays basketball with the president and shares White House rituals like the Easter Egg Roll. Fact boxes with tidbits about the history of the White House itself and a collage of famous pets are included. Did you know John Quincy Adams kept an alligator there?

A tuckered Bo curls up on a bean bag bed for a well-deserved rest at the end, Aryal said.

Yahoo News

News: Obama’s half-sister, the writer

April 3, 2009

Obama sibling as writer

President Obama’s half-sister has a book deal for a children’s picture story.

Maya Soetoro-Ng’s “Ladder to the Moon,” based in part on Obama’s mother and other family members, will be published by Candlewick Press at a date not yet determined. According to Candlewick, Soetoro-Ng will pay “homage to her mother’s tradition of storytelling.”

The late Ann Dunham is mother both to Obama and Soetoro-Ng, who was born in 1970, nine years after the future president. (Obama and Soetoro-Ng have different fathers.) Soetoro-Ng, who teaches at an all-girls school in Honolulu, campaigned for her half-brother and spoke at last year’s Democratic National Convention.

Los Angeles Times

Change Has Come

Change Has Come
An Artist Celebrates Our American Spirit
By Kadir Nelson
Illustrated by Kadir Nelson

Available 01/13/09

The black and white images throughout are personal reflections, uniquely felt and rendered by award winning artist Kadir Nelson. They are accompanied by the uplifting words of Barack Obama and commemorate the movement and the moment that have changed our history. It’s a celebration of the power of inspiration. It’s a celebration of how far we have come and how determined we are to look ahead. It’s a celebration of pride, hope and joy personally felt and publicly shared. Most of all it’s a celebration of the 44th president – a new president and a new chapter in the American story.

Michelle Obama: An American Story

Michelle Obama: An American Story
by David Colbert

Available December 2008

Michelle Obama grew up on Chicago’s South Side, and while the world outside her door was chaotic and ever-changing, her family provided a stable environment in which she could grow and flourish. This look at Michelle Obama’s life and the turning points that shaped her shows how a girl from a working class background could rise to become one of the most influential women of her day.But this is more than a straight chronological retelling. This book looks at Michelle Obama’s life story within the context of the larger movements in African American history: slavery, freedom, the Reconstruction era, the Civil Rights movement, and finally, her own era. History is what has shaped Michelle and challenged her. And ultimately, not only has she overcome any obstacles put before her, she has carved out her own place in history as well.

The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama

The Breakthrough
Politics and Race in the Age of Obama
Written by Gwen Ifill

Available January 20, 2009

In THE BREAKTHROUGH, veteran journalist Gwen Ifill surveys the American political landscape, shedding new light on the impact of Barack Obama’s stunning presidential campaign and introducing the emerging young African American politicians forging a bold new path to political power.

Ifill argues that the Black political structure formed during the Civil Rights movement is giving way to a generation of men and women who are the direct beneficiaries of the struggles of the 1960s. She offers incisive, detailed profiles of such prominent leaders as Newark Mayor Cory Booker, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, and U.S. Congressman Artur Davis of Alabama, and also covers up-and-coming figures from across the nation. Drawing on interviews with power brokers like Senator Obama, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Vernon Jordan, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and many others, as well as her own razor-sharp observations and analysis of such issues as generational conflict and the “black enough” conundrum, Ifill shows why this is a pivotal moment in American history.

THE BREAKTHROUGH is a remarkable look at contemporary politics and an essential foundation for understanding the future of American democracy.