Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
By Barack Obama

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.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #92 in Books
• Published on: 2004-08-10
• Released on: 2004-08-10
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

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Editorial Reviews

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

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Customer Reviews

Thanks for this incitation to dream
This book is not a memoir or even Memoirs. It is a novel, a non-fictional true novel because life is a novel and even at times poetry, and Barack Obama is an absolutely perfect writer who captures the living texture of this life with gusto, taste and style. The book of course is a chase and search for the author’s father by the author himself as far as far can be, including in the green hills of Africa. But it is also a lot more. It is the discovery of family roots growing in two different soils, continents or even universes. But Barack Obama is not psychotic nor schizophrenic, so he tells us the story of how he brought unity to himself without in any way negating the dual carriage way of his personality. He shows and even demonstrates how one cannot be anything in life if one does not build that personal unity from the patchwork of their lives. Some of his brothers, or sisters, or parents succeed with various methods. Some others fail or at least linger in unsuccessful attempts. Now, that is only the first element of the book that makes it an autobiography of sort. It is though and yet a lot more and I am going to give only a few examples. I like his “Home Squared” or even Home Power Three or Home Tripled, or whatever. I will insist on the power element because this approach of home gives power to the subject. This power comes from the ability of the subject to join the immediate home environment in which he or she lives to the original family home from which he or she comes, that is to say the parents’ home that is in Obama’s case double since he knew his father at first as coming from Kenya seen as his home and he discovers that he came from what this father called his Home Squared, that is to say the home base of his father’s father. Obama’s conception of a human being seems to be such a piled up pyramid made of many tiers, strata, layers, one on top of the other in the present, one deeper than the other into the past, and what about the future that gets its inspiration from this heap of potentials and possible realizations of one’s dreams. This leads to a remark on authenticity that cannot be attached to one personal parameter connected to the outside world, including African-ness. Authenticity is attached to the contradictory unified patchwork that makes us what we are inside. I think Obama could easily reach beyond and add “at any discrete moment of one’s life”, no two moments even in close temporal succession being ever the same. We are ever changing and yet always the same, because we are what we see or even dream ourselves. The last point I will make is about his dynamic vision of the law. He knows the law can be seen as reflecting narrow-minded interests and greed. But he also knows that the law is a human creation that comes from the conversation between and among various individuals and circumstances reflecting the complex conflictive context of humanity at any moment in its history, a conversation that is aiming at creating balance and equilibrium even if in many cases it is biased and severely one-sided. But his phrase “a nation arguing with its conscience” is beautiful and worth sitting in any sacred corpus of canonical texts, including Goethe’s Faust Second Part. It is, and should always be, a canon of American culture because we hold such truths to be self evident.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

Important Read for All Americans
This is a well-written and inspiring non-political account of an American’s life like no other. We can be a better people.

Best to read it through the prism of current events
I picked this book up because Obama most likely will be our next President. It seemed strange that this might happen and I had not yet read what was said to be his well received memoir. The book was published 13 years ago by someone whom Im sure never expected he would be a candidate for President. What politician with those ambitions would reveal so much about him self in a memoir? I wondered as I read along what my reaction might have been if I had picked this up in 1995. In presenting a review of the book one has a hard time separating Politian Obama from writer Obama. Obama is a good writer and he does a fairly good job of letting the reader into his thoughts and conflicts as he tries to search for an identify through his black father (and his extended family during visits to Kenya). Most of the book is a coming of age perspective on how Obama was raised by his white mother and grandparents in tolerant multi racial Hawaii and his search for his identity as a tolerant black man. You sense that Obama is observant of others, their views, cultures and belief systems. He seems interested in how various people establish their own value judgments. He makes observations much like a novelist and at one point I felt Obamas book read a bit like a Paul Theroux travel book without the sarcasm (Black Star Safari I think my recommendation of the book is contingent upon what you as a reader and voter want to know about Obamas background. What Obama offers up is more than you will get from any other politician. I doubt, however, that I would have finished the book if I had tried to read it in 1995. Although interesting, the narrative is not very compelling unless you read it through the prism of current events. (My three star review is based on reading this without the prism of current events.)