Product Description

Nine years before the Senate campaign that made him one of the most influential and compelling voices in American politics, Barack Obama published this lyrical, unsentimental, and powerfully affecting memoir, which became a #1 New York Times bestseller when it was reissued in 2004. Dreams from My Father tells the story of Obama’s struggle to understand the forces that shaped him as the son of a black African father and white American mother—a struggle that takes him from the American heartland to the ancestral home of his great-aunt in the tiny African village of Alego.

Obama opens his story in New York, where he hears that his father—a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man—has died in a car accident. The news triggers a chain of memories as Barack retraces his family’s unusual history: the migration of his mother’s family from small-town Kansas to the Hawaiian islands; the love that develops between his mother and a promising young Kenyan student, a love nurtured by youthful innocence and the integrationist spirit of the early sixties; his father’s departure from Hawaii when Barack was two, as the realities of race and power reassert themselves; and Barack’s own awakening to the fears and doubts that exist not just between the larger black and white worlds but within himself.

Propelled by a desire to understand both the forces that shaped him and his father’s legacy, Barack moves to Chicago to work as a community organizer. There, against the backdrop of tumultuous political and racial conflict, he works to turn back the mounting despair of the inner city. His story becomes one with those of the people he works with as he learns about the value of community, the necessity of healing old wounds, and the possibility of faith in the midst of adversity.

Barack’s journey comes full circle in Kenya, where he finally meets the African side of his family and confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life. Traveling through a country racked by brutal poverty and tribal conflict, but whose people are sustained by a spirit of endurance and hope, Barack discovers that he is inescapably bound to brothers and sisters living an ocean away—and that by embracing their common struggles he can finally reconcile his divided inheritance.

A searching meditation on the meaning of identity in America, Dreams from My Father might be the most revealing portrait we have of a major American leader—a man who is playing, and will play, an increasingly prominent role in healing a fractious and fragmented nation.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #699 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-09
• Released on: 2007-01-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 464 pages

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 AudioFile
Barack Obama, a black man raised by his white mother and grandparents, decided to journey to Kenya to learn more about his African father after receiving news of his death. This memoir is not about his father's life, but about Obama's, and he brings that home with an intimate tone rather than that of his public speeches. (His 2004 Democratic Convention keynote address is included at the end.) Throughout the book, the U.S. Senator looks at race from the point of view of someone who has seen and been part of a variety of cultures, and he explains how his perspective shaped his views. The book, written in 1995, before his election to the Illinois Senate, gives listeners a chance to learn more about a young senator who has recently made news by speaking out on the Patriot Act and President Bush's next Supreme Court nomination. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

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

Customer Reviews

Nightmares
Would be a better title from his polygamist alcoholic father who abanonded everyone in his family. Read closely and you will see the roots of the radical rage that we will all inherit from this corrupt loser...the father and the son...if he is ever elected. I dare you to delve into his past and believe he is a good man. Chicago anyone?

Inspired...Hopeful...Daring to dream...Desperate for change
America is desperate for change. I fear how far the country will continue to spiral downward without it. Collectively, let us bless this man (and his family) with our thoughts, prayers and good intentions.

Very easy to read
I just finished this book and it was one of the better books I have read recently. It was very easy to read. Obama was very candid and I was impressed at how open and real he was in this book.... I feel like I know Barack Obama better now.