Product Description
In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father—a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man—has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey—first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance.
Pictured in lefthand photograph on cover: Habiba Akumu Hussein and Barack Obama, Sr. (President Obama's paternal grandmother and his father as a young boy). Pictured in righthand photograph on cover: Stanley Dunham and Ann Dunham (President Obama's maternal grandfather and his mother as a young girl).
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Product Details
Amazon Sales Rank: #14 in Books
Published on: 2004-08-10
Released on: 2004-08-10
Original language: English
Number of items: 1
Binding: Paperback
480 pages
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama was offered a book contract, but the intellectual journey he planned to recount became instead this poignant, probing memoir of an unusual life. Born in 1961 to a white American woman and a black Kenyan student, Obama was reared in Hawaii by his mother and her parents, his father having left for further study and a return home to Africa. So Obama's not-unhappy youth is nevertheless a lonely voyage to racial identity, tensions in school, struggling with black literature?with one month-long visit when he was 10 from his commanding father. After college, Obama became a community organizer in Chicago. He slowly found place and purpose among folks of similar hue but different memory, winning enough small victories to commit himself to the work?he's now a civil rights lawyer there. Before going to law school, he finally visited Kenya; with his father dead, he still confronted obligation and loss, and found wellsprings of love and attachment. Obama leaves some lingering questions?his mother is virtually absent?but still has written a resonant book. Photos not seen by PW. Author tour.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Obama argues with himself on almost every page of this lively autobiographical conversation. He gets you to agree with him, and then he brings in a counternarrative that seems just as convincing. Son of a white American mother and of a black Kenyan father whom he never knew, Obama grew up mainly in Hawaii. After college, he worked for three years as a community organizer on Chicago's South Side. Then, finally, he went to Kenya, to find the world of his dead father, his "authentic" self. Will the truth set you free, Obama asks? Or will it disappoint? Both, it seems. His search for himself as a black American is rooted in the particulars of his daily life; it also reads like a wry commentary about all of us. He dismisses stereotypes of the "tragic mulatto" and then shows how much we are all caught between messy contradictions and disparate communities. He discovers that Kenya has 400 different tribes, each of them with stereotypes of the others. Obama is candid about racism and poverty and corruption, in Chicago and in Kenya. Yet he does find community and authenticity, not in any romantic cliche{‚}, but with "honest, decent men and women who have attainable ambitions and the determination to see them through." Hazel Rochman
Review
"[Barack Obama] is that rare politician who can actually write - and write movingly and genuinely." Michiko Kakutani, New York Times "Fluidly, calmly, insightfully, Obama guides us straight to the intersection of the most serious questions of identity, class, and race." Washington Post Book World "Beautifully crafted... moving and candid... this book belongs on the shelf beside works like James McBride's The Color of Winter and Gregory Howard Williams's Life on the Color Line as a tale of living astride America's racial categories.." Scott Turow"
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Customer Reviews
A must read by anyone looking to understand the forces that helped shape our 44th President
This book features one of the neatest, pithiest author bios in memory: "Barack Obama was elected President of the United States on November 4, 2008."
Perfect.
The book is a revelation. Chided by opponents as someone who could simply "give a good speech," 'Dreams' unveils a man who is also a writer of the highest order. Just the other day, Republican speechwriter Peggy Noonan, in previewing the inauguration, praised Mr. Obama's efforts in an editorial in The Wall Street Journal:
"Mr. Obama is a writer, and he sees himself as a writer. It is an important part of his self-perception. He is the author of two books, the first of considerable literary merit. He loves words. It is in writing that he absorbs, organizes data, thinks his way through to views and decisions, all of which adds to the expectations for his speech."
I fully agree. "Dreams from my Father" is a first-rate memoir of considerable literary merit. It's a must read by anyone with even the slightest interest in understanding the forces that helped shape the 44th President of the United States.
I think it's important to read the 2004 paperback re-release, as its prologue allows the writer to look back at himself and his work almost a decade later. It also allows his audience to peer into the president's thinking four years ago at the moment in time when he first burst into the nation's consciousness with his breakthrough Keynote Address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
Riveting
This book was a riveting look at a journey taken by a boy who became a man on the way. You can see how this man has traveled to the place that he is in now as President of the United States, kudos.
A must read, albeit
The President is a great writer, and there is much to learn about him, about some of what formed him, about being branded (in his case black skin), and about oneself too.
BUT, the book seems to lose it in the midst of his visit to Kenya and the death of his father. It's almost as if he still can't get to what the "from" my father is about. Given who he seems to be now, seemingly he's come a long way from that point and yet may still be griped by the inherent hole.
