Hello again, I'm Orin Alney.

Are you ready for a somewhat critical new look at former president Barack Obama?

That's what I'm talking about on this podcast with David Garrow.

Garrow won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

And spent nine years writing his massive new work, Rising Star, the

making of Barack Obama. Mr. Obama himself read the manuscript and spent eight hours talking

with Garrow, but Rising Star is hardly an authorized biography. The former president doesn't get off

all that easy. For example, his own work,

dreams from my father, gets a critical new reading from Garrow, not as a memoir, but as a kind

of historical fiction, part of what Garrow describes as Obama's creation of his own history,

his own mythology. I interviewed Garrow in front of an audience in downtown Los Angeles for Sokolow Public Square.

Here's my first question.

I am sitting here with David Garrow, and I am very happy to see David Garrow.

He is the author of Rising Star, The Making of Barack Obama.

You remember him.

He used to be president of the United States.

This is a 1,460-page pre-presidential biography. He began working on it in 2008, and it was published in 2017, just this year.

He's a regular contributor to the New York Times, The Washington Post. He's also author of Bering the Cross, Martin Luther King, Jr.

and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

He won a Pulitzer Prize for that one in 1987.

He's written other books as well.

And let us celebrate his presence.

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