Rising Star

Coming soon: Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama by David Garrow.

Washington Post: “It is in the personal realm that Garrow’s account is particularly revealing. He shares for the first time the story of a woman Obama lived with and loved in Chicago, in the years before he met Michelle, and whom he asked to marry him. Sheila Miyoshi Jager, now a professor at Oberlin College, is a recurring presence in Rising Star … In Garrow’s telling, Obama made emotional judgments on political grounds. A close mutual friend of the couple recalls Obama explaining that ‘the lines are very clearly drawn. … If I am going out with a white woman, I have no standing here.’”