Journalist David Maraniss has penned a new book on President Barack Obama, which will come out mid June. Maraniss, a serial biograher has written on the lives of Bill Clinton, Al Gore and Roberto Clemente to name a few.  His latest on the current president is getting pre-publishing buzz becasue of his interviews with "Barry's" old girlfriends and because the book revives our president's pot smoking days with more detail than we've heard before.

While we haven't recieved advance copies of the book, USA Today ran this excerpt:

"As a member of the Choom Gang, Barry Obama was known for starting a few pot-smoking trends. The first was called "TA," short for "total absorption." To place this in the physical and political context of another young man who would grow up to be president, TA was the antithesis of Bill Clinton's claim that as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford he smoked dope but never inhaled.

Along with TA, Barry popularized the concept of "roof hits": when they were chooming in the car all the windows had to be rolled up so no smoke blew out and went to waste; when the pot was gone, they tilted their heads back and sucked in the last bit of smoke from the ceiling.

Barry also had a knack for interceptions. When a joint was making the rounds, he often elbowed his way in, out of turn, shouted "Intercepted!," and took an extra hit. No one seemed to mind."

Oh boy! That may give the president some problems on the campaign trail but we have to say that it's got our curiosity piqued. If you can't wait and need to satiate your appetite with more from the book, then you can read about Obama's young romance here where Vanity Fair published an excerpt along with an interview with the author. 

We especially love the letters from Obama to his former girlfriend, which are so lyrical. He's definitely a natural born writer. We kind of wished those letters were addressed to us two decades ago. But, wait, that wouldn't work. 

Here's a line from one of his letters: "I stretch long and slow, twist and shake, the fatigue, the inertia finding home in different parts of the body." .....It's about running, by the way.