The definitive account of Barack Obama's life before he became the 44th president of the United States - the formative years, confluence of forces, and influential figures who helped shaped an extraordinary leader and his rise - from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Bearing the Cross.

Barack Obama's keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention instantly catapulted the little-known state senator from Illinois into the national spotlight. Three months later Obama would win election to the US Senate; four years later he would make history as America's first black president. Now, at the end of his second presidential term, David J. Garrow delivers the most compelling and comprehensive Obama biography - as epic in vision and rigorous in detail as Robert Caro's The Power Broker.

Moving around the globe, from Hawaii to Indonesia to the American Northeast and Midwest, Rising Star meticulously unpacks Obama's life, from his tumultuous upbringing in Honolulu and Jakarta to his formative time as a community organizer on Chicago's South Side, working in some of the roughest neighbourhoods, to Cambridge, where he excelled at Harvard Law School, and finally back to Chicago, where he pursued his political destiny. In voluminous detail, drawn from more than 1,000 interviews and encyclopaedic documentary research, Garrow reveals as never before the ambition, the dreams, and the all-too-human struggles of an iconic president in a sure to be news-making biography that will stand as the most authoritative account of Obama's pre-presidential life for decades to come.