From the author of What’s the Matter with California? comes a bold, well-researched examination of whether Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father— and whether it is more myth than fact.

How did Barack Obama, a man who had previously written little else, suddenly pen what Time magazine calls “the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician”? Here, in Deconstructing Obama, political scholar and author Jack Cashill analyzes and pieces together Obama’s statements about his life to get at the truth behind the man.

Cashill’s “eureka” moment came when he realized that the structure of Dreams of My Father loosely mirrors that of Homer’s Odyssey. From the moment of that revelation, Cashill researched, read, and examined interviews, writings, and statements about the President’s life story, focusing especially on a poem written when Obama was nineteen. According to the facts, in conjunction with Obama’s statements and writings, Cashill’s conclusion is that the stories don’t add up—and for the nearly 2 million people who read and accepted the story about Obama’s life—the truth is that it may be more myth than history.