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 Obamas paternal grandmother and his father as a young boy). Pictured in righthand photograph on cover: Stanley Dunham and Ann Dunham (President Obamas maternal grandfather and his mother as a young girl).
Well Satisfied.
Would I have read this book had its author not been elected President of the United States? Probably not, but I would have missed a book worth reading.
The miracle of Obamas election last November only grows after reading this account of his childhood, youth and young manhood. We learn how he was born, the result of a romance between his Kenyan father and young American mother; how his father returns to Africa, his mother remarries an Indonesian man and his years in that country. Returning to Hawaii, the young Obama goes through years of confusion about his identity and the meaning of his blackness. He becomes a community organizer in Chicago (these chapters provide the most vivid writing) and visits his late fathers family in Kenya.
One is struck by the fact that this young man has graduated from the University of Life as well as Harvard Law School. He knows firsthand about poverty and the problems of our innercities. He knows how so many young black men have fallen victim to hopelessness and the streets. He knows from direct experience how hard it is to make progress, to fight the dead weight of poverty.
One thing I miss in this book is the birth of Obamas ambition. He presents himself as a young drifter engaged in an intellectual search for identity but he must have been much more than that. What impelled him to grab the chance to transfer to Columbia University? Were not precisely told. What prompted him to go to Harvard law. Again, its left a bit opaque.
Another quibble: we get too much for my liking about the elder Obama, the absent father, and not enough about his mother who stuck around to raise him. We learn about Dr. Obamas blighted career, his many infidelities, his bewildering set of offspring with various women, his drinking, his reckless generosity and on and on. Also a little too much about the mythic origins of the Obama clan deep in African prehistory.
If Obama is the product of an African father and a white mother, it is the absent father who looms much the larger in his imagination. The white side of his family — his long-suffering mother and the grandparents who helped raise him — get short shrift. We hear about Obamas grandfathers attitude to race and black. He too is a disappointed man who failed to live up to his own expectations of himself. Yet, he helped produce Obama.
Its fascinating to me how an absent parent can loom larger in a young mans mind than the one who stuck around and did the hard day-to-day job of raising the child.
The writing is admirably clear and for the most part the book is consistently interesting. I think we are blessed by having such a self-aware and knowledgeable man as our president. This is far more than the usual campaign-biography, produced with a ghost writer to present the candidate or potential candidate in the best possible light. This is a real book about a real person. Thats the highest praise I can offer.
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Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama
