IVN's A Civil Assessment host T.J. O’Hara interviews David Garrow on his new book, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, released this month.

David discusses Obama before his political career took off, and the choices he made that led to the ex-president we see today. Regarding the book, host T.J. O'Hara says, “It was almost like you couldn’t recognize the early Barack Obama when you compared and contrasted him to the presidential Barack Obama.”

David is a professor of Law & History and Distinguished Faculty Scholar at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. Prior to moving to Pittsburgh, He was Senior Research Fellow at Homerton College, University of Cambridge. David is the author of a number of biographies and historical books, including, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, for which he won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in Biography.

David regularly contributes to the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the American Prospect, and more. His academic writings have been published in the Supreme Court Review, the Yale Law Journal, the University of Chicago Law Review, Cornell Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, and Constitutional Commentary. He has taught at Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the City University of New York, The Cooper Union, the College of William and Mary, American University, and Emory University.

David was born in Massachusetts in 1953, graduated magna cum laude from Wesleyan University in 1975, and received his Ph.D. from Duke University in 1981. In 2003, he married Virginia Darleen Opfer, now Director of RAND Education and Distinguished Chair in Education Policy.