david maraniss will begin taking this in just a minute. vid raniss, in your book on the reference transfer fathr healle bit from president obama in 2004 for talking about his autobiography. >> you know, just had an aparance on charlie rose. he was asking me, how does the book con witr oiic it's very clear to me there is a direct line between the subject matter ontained in "dreams from my father" and the types of politics i aspire to. because essentially what this story but is a boy born to a father from kenya and a mother from kansas in hawaii with an unusual na who traveled to indonesia, ame kfu el cgok om the lowest income neighborhoods in the country and then traveled back to africa and somehow was able to weave together a okamf s afican-american, as an american and as somebody who's part of the broader human family. and that was not an easy ak wtat usdinave some enormous love for my family. i did. it wasn't because they didn't have people help would be every step of the way. i had that whole. mybr astride a nation in a world that is so

david maraniss joins us now. thank you for being with us. >> thank you, jude he a great to be here. >> woodruff: you didn't just dash this book off. you went all over the world, went through reems of documents, interviewed how those people. how is this different than preparing for the biography of president clinton? >> that was centered in arkansas which is, you know, another place of someone coming out of nowhere. but to tell this story of barack obama, it really is a global story in so many ways. that's what fascinated me in the beginning. sort of the unlikeliness of this character coming from so many different places and weaving it together into someone who became president. >> woodruff: you were saying you decided to write it on the night of the election. you had been thinking about it, but the night he became president... >> it overwhelmd me that night. before that, i have to confess that over the years before that, i had been a little bit dispirited by the modern american political culture and was not sure

david maraniss, welcome. >> thank you, howard. >> you spent four years researching the early years ofobama. and what made headlines was his drug use and the journal of his old new york girlfriend. does that bother you? >> you know, i have to -- i don't want to whine about it. i knew that that would happen. yeah -- >> how did you know? the nature of the beast? >> the nature of the media beast. yeah, the way that the culture's changed so much from my last book, you know, with the social networking and people looking for something and getting most hits right and all of that. so i wasn't -- not going to whine about it. i knew it was coming. of course it bothers me because i spent four years trying to get the context and the real story. when you just cherry pick things from it, you know, i mean -- >> suddenly it's 140 characters. >> exactly. >> i want to get into the way you tackled this reporting challenge. so why, for example, did you spend so much time reporting on obama's relatives in kenya? >> well, first of all, i do a book that i want to do. that's the first rule. who obsessed me we

. >> there are two wonderful books outnoourel-a is wngonhes wog heer.rnis david maraniss is working onanother biography at tim d e ets ea byioolihiia at worth reading. walter isakson's book on steve jobs is a perfect exple. phenanthgoeg on reg?e cutl ueiad etiy, actually. i read a wonderful book written by a british fly fisherman about his father in worldar i callblot m inoue48 aiumnd ac ro thurmond and dewey, fit election after the war. i'm reading the book about george bush and how he decided to go to war. mye inisd cer go gndolie at i read a lot of magazine stuff, a lot of essays. i read, i actually opened up a little correspondence with a et bthe onha aulfet h e herkbo toiny,soe a ttlexchange, and that was ite gratifying. i don't pretind to be a great writer. i am engetic, and i'mret od metis,ut treat ervein wt inls ifes. anhe sereats t booktv.org. >> here's a look at some books that are being published this week. potica coultantme rv a picls anen enh gus wee fi.thail a t in "the long walk: a story of war and the life that follows," former u.s. air force officer exenisngeds ysician

and i would put it right up there with when crime still mattered by david maraniss or richard ben kramer's book on dimaggio that i loved and edited, seabiscuit. it's a book about much more than sports. the only other one i'll tell you about is a novel by herman wouk. he just turned 97 years old, and when i was in grad school, i actually wrote my master's thesis on the idea of entertainment as literature. and literature as entertainment. and wouk was the writer i wrote about to exemplify that. his novels. and he's written a new novel that is very much sort of a latter-day e pis lair update of marjorie morningstar. and it's called "the lawgiver," and it's about a bunch of people trying to make a movie about the life of moses. and i can't wait to share it with the world. and i think it's just amazing that this man whose first novel was published by simon & schuster about 61 years ago has returned to simon & schuster and is still going strong at 97. >> morgan entrekin. >> um, well, i'm very excited about mark -- [inaudible] new book. a year ago he started to report on the killing of osama bin

. >> david maraniss, how old was she when she killed herself? >> with 26. >> why did she kill herself? >> she killed herself because of what we know is she left a suicide note that she was distraught with her husband's philandering. that was the immediate cause. >> the president's grandfather, stanley's mother. >> 26 and because of that dramatic event stanley and his older brother ralph moved back to eldodo. living with his grandparents and his great-grandfather, christopher columbus clark who fought in the civil war. >> where did stanley and madeleine's grandparents meet? >> in augusta which is 12 or 13 miles from eldorado. sort of on the way to wichita and that is where madeleine grew up and stan had been out of high school several years and that one was a senior in high school and was working in construction and renovation of an oil plant. >> what was their life like? >> their life before they move door after? after they married it was sort of her parents didn't really like him. as of matter-of-fact the first thing her father quote is i don't

washington post associate editor david maraniss wrote a new biography of president obama.n after the release, maraniss became the target for the birther crowd who misquoted and misused information from his book to further their absurd conspiracy theories about the president. rather than ignore them, maraniss responded in a scathing this weekend in the washington post. of the bertha conspiracy theorists, he wrote i hold them in contempt and undermine the role of serious history as they concoct conspiracy theories. well, despite all evidence to the contrary, what konts to drive? and i ask this question, what does continue to drive the sizable number of americans who still believe the president isn't really what he says. david, you've done it again. you've written the book on someone. you've done a great job and now you've got at least the first volume on this president of ours wlo is, for some reason, the target of the strangest conspiracy theories. i think he did a good job of saying how -- what would it take to have been the person who concocted the idea of him being born

so i just finished reading author david maraniss' new book" barack obama: the story."is logged 50,000 miles, conducted 400 interviews. the result is the 600 page biography and it ends with his acceptance to the harvard law school meaning there's more to the story. while he told me his goal was not to vet the president's own memoir, many readers will be focused on the story and dreams from my father. the bigger story is what maraniss' revelations say about what others missed or did not seek to find. time and again where mere contentions have become the stuff of internet lore, maraniss uncovers never before revealed information. including about the president's birth. not long after president obama's mother delivered the future president, maraniss says a gynecologist dined with a friend who asked well, dr. west tell me something interesting that happened to you this week. dr. west was a colleague of david a. sinclair who delivered barack obama and he responded with a quip. he said stanley had a baby. well, he went on to say that stanley in this instance was a young woman,

washington post associate editor david maraniss wrote a new biography of president obama.me the target for the birther crowd who misquoted and misused information from his book to further their absurd conspiracy theories about the president. rather than ignore them, maraniss responded in aoped this weekend. he said, i hold them in contempt for the way they disregard facts and common sense and undermine the role of serious history as they concoct conspiracy theories that portray the president as danger, alien, and less than american. i ask, what does continue to drive the sizable number of americans who still believe the president isn't what he says. david is the author of "barack obama the story." you have written the book on someone. you did it for a great job. now you have done at least the first volume on the president of ours who is for some reason the target of the strangest conspiracy theories. i think you did a good job of saying how it -- what would it take to have been the person who concocted the idea of him being born overseas, somehow got the people at the time

for example i would be -- i would not be surprised if david maraniss barack obama book that should drop any day now does phenomenally well because of all the things to come with "vanity fair" and all the other magazines. people are very curious and it's a very big book. that's the first book that comes to my mind that i know they're a number of other political books that should be dropping very soon. >> we have been talking lucero weinman who is in his director of publishers marketplace. interested in following public news? the web site publishers marketplace.com and if you want to follow sarah on twitter, she is a constant twitterer. sarah w. matt? sarah w? >> i tried to keep it simple by getting twitter very early so i was fortunate to have as few characters as possible so i could have 134 characters less to say what i had to say. >> thank you for being on booktv. >> thank you so much, peter. a pleasure as always. coming up next on booktv, after words with guest hosts phyllis bennis of the institute for policy studies. this week middle east expert, fawaz gerges and his latest book, "o

. >> reporter: david maraniss did extensive research into the obama family for his book. >> it includedcottish and german from the white side of his family. and now we're discovering something more. >> reporter: mayor a nranis who traveled to kenya said the president's diverse roots make him hard to categorize. >> because of the color of his skin and his father's background he was african-american, but culturally he was -- he was not. he had to learn it. he has never been easy to pigeonhole. that's part of the attraction and mystery of barack obama. >> reporter: the ancestry.com team did two years of research to puzzle this out. they looked through thousands of pages of colonial records. they got the dna from the bunch family. without the documented connection to john punch they're certain about their finding about the president's slave ancestor on his mother's side. gayle, charlie. >> amazing what you can find. thank you, bill. >> you know what interests me most about all of this is whatever the life that this president had or any other president, how did it influence who he or she is

next is david maraniss, a reeroctedir tasng p -ahowo histen be ubung book barack obama, the story. next to davids thenel etend ridatohn s ho bclg mo o tn baseball and america changed forever. tonight's author is the former press secretary for senator jay rockefeller ame he m tn oea seinisond pa aam ohe five journalists profiled. a graduate of georgetown and is currently a senior vice president at ahingtoavent pc ir ths th cateou mitns . as your penpal, perched a lite awkwardly here, i managed to rror pay me a few weeks. isco t y obyd so an ngn germany, but the truth is a tri hading towards a poolside bar and search her a strawberrymrria. gh pti knommrntent ngju puked. it was at a well-known family resort flr ik ow w h m ho o christmas day 1944 at the hotel provides in luxembourg baorllorpotsliquid ctm mae.ofas thheong fall in t bate ofhe bulge were invited to pop h party that day, including a 28-year-old united press corespondent, who too hewa a tps a wiccasinnsoing on and ter tks wking in the countryside, purchased two scorer two bottles of booze despite thegoan he hl prp eyed and

. >> david maraniss his grandparents died in 2006. did president obama ever meet him?t after the 1980's after his grandfather had died. aside from the very early days of his birth but he didn't get back to kenya until both of his grandparents were gone so there's a dramatic diference in that part of the story. >> for barack obama the story how many interviews did you do over the course of the last four years? >> guest: i would say almost 400, and i had a wonderful assistant who helped with some of the leader interviews in the story but i traveled all over the world and so everybody could find in every part of the life of president obama and his parents and grandparents. >> host: barack obama sr. was born in 1936. what was his childhood like? >> guest: from a fairly early age he was dealing with western culture in the british. he was a very smart kid. his father was difficult to get along with and was not often there mostly in the nairobi and he was growing up. he was lucky in the sense that he was smart enough to get into a very good school in that area, and although h

david can. most frightening words in america uses to be, michael moore is in the lobby. now it's maraniss is interviewing your ex-girlfriend. >> and to now to chip. it's not easy being the child of a famous person, especially when your real dad is everybody else's surrogate dad. chip did not know me from adam when the process started three years ago. i called him just a few weeks after his dad died. which could not have been an easy time for him. could not have been more helpful, more gracious, a better gentleman. went into the family archives, dug out a bunch of stuff that nobody had seen before. went through his dad's personal papers, dug up a bunch of stuff, and after his dad's long lost wartime correspondence was discovered, chip made absolutely sure that i had full access to everything. i'm delighted that chip's son, walter iv, who is working at cbs, with held from his former hamilton college professor, will be bringing out a book of the definitive wartime letters of walter cronkite. it will be out in a year and could not be more pleased. in fact i defy anyone to read the letter that

. >>> pulitzer prize winner david marinist tells a story of barack obama, telling a story of a high school aged barack obama about what people should fear most. maranisscted personally or internationally, words could be weapons of destruction. indeed. so too can words be powerful when they inspire, motivate. words like tear down this wall can help defeat an empire. words like hope and change can lead to health care transformati transformation. words like mission accomplished can embarrass a nation and words like are you now or have you ever been, can cripple institutions and industries. words like we hold these truths to be self-evident can spark a revolution and words like we the people can empower the individual, even though words like never worked a day in her life can stir a national frenzy and words like uncomfortable can unleash a torrent of backlash and happy white people's independence day can set off a cable chatter. a seemingly never 24 hour of cycle of shampoo, rinse and repeat as needed. now it's my business on cable tv. particularly here on "melissa harris-perry, " we're all about words and try to be as careful as we can to select the wor