Vanity Fair: "Young Barack Obama in Love: A Girlfriend's Secret Diary (Facinating) [View all]
Last edited Wed May 30, 2012, 06:18 PM - Edit history (1)
"This is a Long Read...so, maybe good for Weekend...but fascinating insight into Obama's long relationship with Genvieve Cook and her journals about her relationship with our now President of the USA. It's very personal and I think so private that it sometimes seems "too intimate" between them. I would have hoped this could have waited unti after Obama's second term to be put into the Presidential Archives...but then...I'm old school about Privacy. It's still a good read into Obama from his early years that's not been so much seen except from the books he wrote himself. It's a very touching account with his early relationship with the Swarthmore Gal...who looked so much like his Own Mother ...Ann Dunham that it's uncanny.)
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Becoming Obama
When Barack Obama met Genevieve Cook in 1983 at a Christmas party in New York’s East Village, it was the start of his most serious romance yet. But as the 22-year-old Columbia grad began to shape his future, he was also struggling with his identity: American or international? Black or white? Drawing on conversations with both Cook and the president, David Maraniss, in an adaptation from his new Obama biography, has the untold story of the couple’s time together.
Related: David Maraniss discusses his biography of President Barack Obama—and his reaction to Genevieve Cook’s diaries being used—in a VF.com Q&A.
By David Maraniss
From A.P. Images/Obama Presidential Campaign.
BREAKING AWAY Obama in New York’s Central Park while a student at Columbia University, to which he transferred as a junior in 1981. Six months after graduation he began a long romantic relationship with Genevieve, who, like him, kept a journal.
Adapted from Barack Obama: The Story, by David Maraniss, to be published this month by Simon & Schuster; © 2012 by the author.
Barack Obama transferred from Occidental College to Columbia University in 1981, his junior year. Although he left Los Angeles with enough ambitious propulsion to carry him into a more active period, he instead receded into the most existentialist stretch of his life. As he put it himself decades later during an interview in the Oval Office, “I was leading a very ascetic existence, way too serious for my own good.” In most outward ways, compared with what had come before, his life in New York was a minimalist one, without the sprawling cast of characters that had surrounded him at Oxy and in Hawaii and Indonesia. He felt no attachment to Columbia or to the first jobs he landed after graduation. But it would be a misreading to say that he was tamping down his ambitions during that period. Just the opposite, in fact. If anything, his sense of destiny deepened. He was conducting an intense debate with himself over his past, present, and future, an internal struggle that he shared with only a few close friends, including his girlfriends, Alex McNear and Genevieve Cook, who kept a lasting record, one in letters, the other in her journal.
Much More...Long Read at.......
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2012/06/young-barack-obama-in-love-david-maraniss
Genevieve Cook (there's another photo...not this but in "VF" article that shows Cook looking much more like Ann Dunham. It's really a profound snip about that part of his life with diary of Genvieve Cook from the Wealthy Family and Obama and the intimacies of relationships of young people in that time in America.
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=
&imgrefurl=http://loop21.com/life/obamas-ex-girlfriend-love-letters-genevieve-cook&h=435&w=300&sz=115&tbnid=r5K0AjOgTcpk-M:&tbnh=104&tbnw=72&prev=/search%3Fq%3DPhoto%2Bof%2BGenieve%2BCook%26tbm%3Disch%26tbo%3Du&zoom=1&q=Photo+of+Genieve+Cook&usg=__Gx3C7kkFMjPr9uR5lLtrcnlkZyA=&docid=UDt6OeibcdeyTM&sa=X&ei=NaLGT6vkDoTw0gGSzaSSCw&ved=0CFcQ9QEwBQ&dur=1092
IMAGE OF Genvieve Cook from SWARTHMORE YEAR BOOk:
LINK TO PHOTOS OF YOUNG ANN DUNHAM:
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