Looks at the life of President Barack Obama, including his childhood living in Hawaii, along with information about Hawaiian history and cultural traditions.

A celebration of President Obama's ties to Hawaii highlights the state's cultural traditions and includes photos from Barack Obama's childhood. Full color.

Distinguishing itself from the mass of political biographies of Barack Obama, this first interdisciplinary study of Obama's Indonesian and Hawai'ian years examines their effect on his adult character, political identity, and global world-view. The first 18 years of President Obama's life, from his birth in 1961 to his departure for college in 1979, were spent in Hawai'i and Indonesia. These years fundamentally shaped the traits for which the adult Obama is noted—his protean identity, his nuanced appreciation of multiple views of the same object, his cosmopolitan breadth of view, and his self-rooted "outpost" patriotism. Barack Obama in Hawai'i and Indonesia: The Making of a Global President is the first study to examine, in fascinating detail, how his early years impacted this unique leader. Existing biographies of President Obama are primarily political treatments. Here, cross-cultural psychologist and marketing consultant Dinesh Sharma explores the connections between Obama's early upbringing and his adult views of civil society, secular Islam, and globalization. The book draws on the author's on-the-ground research and extensive first-hand interviews in Jakarta; Honolulu; New York; Washington, DC; and Chicago to evaluate the multicultural inputs to Obama's character and the ways in which they prepared him to meet the challenges of world leadership in the 21st century.

As the first African-American editor of the "Harvard Law Review, " the first African-American presidential nominee of a major political party, and eventually the first African-American president of the United States, Barack Obama has consistently shattered barriers--barriers that some people thought could never be overcome.