The Punahou Years

January 20, 2009, the West Front of the United States Capitol. Barack Hussein Obama II, forty-seven, is sworn in as the forty-fourth President of the United States — the first Black president in the country's 232-year history. He has served three years in the United States Senate. He has the largest single-day inauguration crowd in American history. He will serve two terms. He will win the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2009. He will sign the Affordable Care Act in March 2010, the Dodd-Frank financial-reform bill in July 2010, and the Paris Agreement on climate change in December 2015. He will order the May 1, 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden. He will be succeeded on January 20, 2017 by Donald Trump.

Theodore Pemberton's biography opens earlier — in Honolulu, where Barack was born on August 4, 1961, the only child of a Kenyan economics-graduate-student father and an eighteen-year-old Kansas-American mother — and follows the arc through the Punahou School years, the move to Jakarta with his stepfather Lolo Soetoro, the return to Honolulu and the Stanley Ann Dunham years, the Occidental College and Columbia University years, the Chicago Developing Communities Project work in Roseland, Harvard Law School and the Harvard Law Review presidency, the long University of Chicago Law School teaching and Illinois State Senate years, the 2004 Audacity of Hope Democratic National Convention keynote, the 2004 Senate election, the long 2008 primary contest with Hillary Clinton, the eight years in office, the 2017 transition to Donald Trump, and the long Kalorama-house and Martha's-Vineyard-house post-presidential years.

What emerges is a portrait of the first Black American president — and the eight-year administration the country has spent the years since trying to fully assess.