Below is an excerpt from the new book written by Stu Glauberman, a former Adverti-ser reporter, and Jerry Burris, Advertiser political columnist, titled: "The Dream Begins: How Hawai'i Shaped Barack Obama." The book is available through Watermark Publishing.

As a teenager, Barry Obama wrestled with the two ethnicities that were part of him. On the one side, his father's exotic, all-defining Africanness was a distinguishing inescapable part of him. But he grew up without his father, who had abandoned him in pursuit of a doctorate at Harvard. On the other side was his mother's whiteness, backed by his grandparents' middle-of-the-American-road lifestyle, which he shared while living with them in their two-bedroom apartment on Beretania Street.

In 1973, Barry's mother, Ann Obama Soetoro, separated from her Indonesian second husband and returned to study anthropology at the University of Hawai'i as part of the East-West Center's Culture Learning Institute. For three years, while he was in middle school, Barry would live with his mother and half sister on Poki Street, a field-goal kick away from Punahou School.

Maya Soetoro-Ng, Barry's Indonesian-born half sister, says her earliest memories of Honolulu are of the big chair in which she and her older brother would rock until it fell over backward, causing great laughter. She was 3 and Barry was 12. They grew up like most kids with television and toys and with the usual big brother/ baby sister rivalry and harmony. About to enter his teens in the age of the Jackson Five, Barry was wearing his hair in the Afro style. Soetoro-Ng recalled that Barry was a cool cat who didn't take himself seriously. "He let me mess with his 'fro (Afro)," she told The Maui News. Anyway he could fix his hair anytime because, Maya recalled, Barry always had an Afro pick comb in his back pocket.

"Our childhood was interesting," Soetoro-Ng would later muse. "It was broad. Our lives involved a lot of drifting in and out of worlds here and there. I think we were a little untethered."

If these were happy years for Maya, they were lean years for Barry. He was a shy kid trying to be popular or at least not unpopular with his schoolmates. Being raised by a single mother on a graduate-student stipend meant not having a lot of expensive things. This was in stark contrast to many of his schoolmates whose parents were among Honolulu's rich and famous. Barry was envious of his classmates' split-level houses with big backyards and swimming pools. His mother was accepting food stamps and he was embarrassed when friends came over because there wasn't much in the small fridge to share with kids on the prowl for after-school snacks. When Barry groused about it, his mother set him straight, reminding him that she was a single mom with two kids and a heavy academic load. She did not see herself as Mrs. Cleaver in "Leave It to Beaver."

Barry tried to help his mom, assisting with household chores, shopping and laundry. As a teen, he worked part-time, especially in summer. One of his first jobs was at the Baskin-Robbins ice cream store just around the corner from his grandparents' apartment. While some of his classmates were born with a silver spoon, Barry gained workaday experience handing out pink plastic spoons with the 31 flavors he scooped. Wearing the shop's very uncool brown smock and cap gave him perspective.

"I'm sure that helped shape some of my attitudes as well, just in the sense of sort of an appreciation of people who are having to work hard to get where they need to go because nothing would be handed to him. I think it made me hungrier, a little hungrier than I might have otherwise been," he later told U.S. News & World Report.

Soetoro-Ng never thought of her older brother as a brooding adolescent or teen. She saw him as an "intelligent, sensitive, thoughtful, fun-loving" young man who had plenty of friends but who was also bookish and sometimes wrapped in solitude. "He was always restless," she told a New York Times reporter. "There was always somewhere else he needed to go."

Restless as he was, Barry could not wait for answers to come to him. He had to go looking for them. In retrospect, Maya said, her brother believed that his Punahou friends were pushing an identity on him and that put pressure on him to put a name on himself.

Barry felt that the first thing they saw was an African face leavened with Caucasian blood. Looking back on who he was and how he felt then, Barack Obama said he was trapped between two worlds. At 12 or 13, he felt he had to define himself, one way or another. He had to choose a race.

Sensitive and self-conscious, Barry did not want to be half a loaf of something. He chose to identify himself as black, choosing, as he put it, not to "advertise my mother's race." In his memoir "Dreams From My Father," Obama said he took this course because he did not want to forever ingratiate himself to whites. He did not want others to look at his face, see the telltale signs of mixed race, and take his measure against their own evolving ideas of what it was to be hapa. Obama wrote: "Privately, they guessed at my troubled heart, I suppose — the mixed blood, the divided soul, the ghostly image of the tragic mulatto trapped between two worlds."

Yet Obama's Punahou classmates maintain that being of two or more ethnic backgrounds carried no social stigma. In fact, they considered someone who was halfCaucasian more intriguing than someone who was of a single ethnicity; and someone who was a mixture of races was thought to be more interesting than someone who was merely of two ethnicities.

Those who knew Barry when he was making his decision don't remember him as a person struggling to create an identity. But they did notice one remarkable change in their friend: his gait.

"The way he walked — his walk changed," said former teacher and coach Pal Eldredge. Barry had adopted an athletic, loping, shoulder-swinging gait. "Even his classmates mentioned his gait, how it changed."

Reach Jerry Burris at jrryburris@yahoo.com. Read his daily blog at blogs.honoluluadvertiser.com.