Dreams from My Father

A Story of Race and Inheritance

By Barack Obama

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Average Rating: (See all 4 reviews) Format: Paperback, 480 pages Published In: United States, August 2004 Other Editions: Paperback, USA $33.43 View Quantity Available: 9 24 hour shipping 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. About the Author BARACK OBAMA graduated from Harvard Law School in 1991, where he served as the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. He has worked as a community organizer, civil rights attorney, and law professor. Since 1997, he has represented parts of Chicago’s South Side in the Illinois General Assembly, and he is currently the Democratic nominee to become the junior U.S. senator from Illinois. He lives in Chicago with his wife, Michelle, and daughters, Malia and Sasha. Praise Praise“Provocative . . . Persuasively describes the phenomenon of belonging to two different worlds, and thus belonging to neither.” —New York Times Book Review“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 Water and Gregory Howard Williams’s Life on the Color Line as a tale of living astride America’s racial categories.” —Scott Turow“Obama’s writing is incisive yet forgiving. This is a book worth savoring.” —Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here Read an excerpt Publisher: Three Rivers Press (CA) ISBN: 1400082773 EAN: 9781400082773 Dimensions: 20.5 x 13.46 x 2.64 centimeters (0.34 kg)

I read this to get an insight into the mind of the next president of the United States. My first impression is that of pleasant surprise; it is bewildering that Joe Citizen in the US has chosen a deeply introspective dreamer for a president.

As an English teacher I was looking for little extracts I could use in class for analysis. But, as a reporter in the Dominion Post recently said, there is little in Obama's rhetoric that stands out per se. It appears Obama has taken great pains to not have his message(s) in this book reduced to sound-bytes - perhaps due to his skeptism of sloganeering and the simple aphorisms of the veterans' generation.

I've read several reviews where short passages from 'Dreams from My Father" has been cited as evidence of Obama's... yadda, yadda, yadda. It doesn't work like that. The book needs to considered as a whole, which totally ruins my intentions to photocopy a page or two for Year 13s to study as an Unfamiliar Text.

My loss might be the world's gain. If Obama can walk his talk, if he can successfully wrestle with the dreams he inherited from his father, we will all benefit from his actions.

Obama memoir should be a required reading


The campaign by the republican Party to discredit Barack Obama’s credentials as presidential material has shown how low American politicians and campaigners are willing to sink in order to gain votes.

The recent smear campaign is being orchestrated by a Mr Dinesh D’Souza, a conservative American with Indian roots, who has started to solicit donations for a “Compassion Fund” for Obama’s half-brother George, who has inadvertently become a poster child for the Republican Party’s twisted presidential campaign strategy.

Mr D’Souza claims that he started the fund to show the world that Sen Obama is a hypocrite who claims to care for the underprivileged but does nothing for his own poverty-stricken family in Kenya.

Meanwhile, the Western media has been following the 26-year-old college student around and taking his pictures showing “the youngest brother of the coolest politician in the world” (as the UK’s Sunday Times put it) living in a slum in Nairobi.

To all his detractors, I would like to say just one thing: Read Obama’s memoir; Dreams from My Father, and repent.

Nowhere in this deeply insightful and honest book does Obama pretend that his family in Kenya is living in the lap of luxury, nor does he claim to be their saviour.

Sen Obama is not ashamed of his family in Kenya; he understands that the condition of being poor is not a crime, as some Republicans would have us believe.

But it is a result of global and national forces, which he is seeking to change, not just for the sake of young men like George (whose only fault, he writes, was that he was “born on the wrong side of our father’s cloven world”), but for all the world’s underprivileged people, who remain silent and ashamed of who they are because the world tells them they will never be good enough.

During his visit to Kenya when he was in his 20s, Obama tried to understand how the reality of living in Kenya forces people to turn against their own.

For instance, he even finds it in his heart to empathise with the waiter at Nairobi’s New Stanley hotel, who ignored him and his half-sister Auma, choosing instead to serve white tourists.

The waiter, he writes, has “learned that the same people who controlled the land before independence still control the same land, that he still cannot eat in the restaurants or stay in the hotels that the white man has built…He can’t escape the grip of his memories.

And so he straddles two worlds, uncertain in each, always off balance, playing whichever game staves off the bottomless poverty, careful to let his anger vent itself only on those in the same condition.”

When Obama met his father's side of the family for the first time, he realised that family was more than just a genetic chain, a social construct or an economic unit.

For him, family became a series of concentric circles that get progressively larger to embrace not just one’s immediate family, but entire nations and races.

Unlike Kenyan politicians, who cannot think beyond their village or constituency, Obama dared to think of family as all those, regardless of race, tribe or nation, who are committed to a particular “moral course”.

He sees himself not just as someone who can uplift the lives of his immediate family or the people of the US, but as someone who puts the world on a path where not just his half-brother George will have a chance to improve his life and expect justice, but where everyone on this planet will have a reason to hope for a better world.

In Dreams, Obama talks of the “survivor’s guilt” that many successful black men experience as they leave behind the throngs of jobless black men who cannot dream of securing a well-paid job, let alone aspire to be president of the most powerful nation on earth.

He realised early on his career that gaining individual power for himself was futile because “without power for the group, a group larger even, than an extended family, our success always threatened to leave others behind.

And perhaps it was that fact that left me so unsettled – the fact that even here, in Africa, the same maddening patterns held sway; that no-one here could tell me what my blood ties demanded or how those demands could be reconciled with some larger idea of human association.”

There are few books that have the ability to make me cry with joy, but Obama’s left me completely wet in the face. It is a book that transcends race, class and continent by seeking to find the links that unite all of us as human beings.

My plea to the board that decides which books Kenyan school children and university students should read is that they should include Dreams in their list of required reading, for the sake of present and future generations of Kenyans.


And perhaps it was that fact that left me so unsettled – the fact that even here, in Africa, the same maddening patterns held sway; that no-one here could tell me what my blood ties demanded or how those demands could be reconciled with some larger idea of human association.”

There are few books that have the ability to make me cry with joy, but Obama’s left me completely wet in the face. It is a book that transcends race, class and continent by seeking to find the links that unite all of us as human beings.

My plea to the board that decides which books Kenyan school children and university students should read is that they should include Dreams in their list of required reading, for the sake of present and future generations of Kenyans.

Ms Warah is an editor with the UN.

I found this book really interesting, not just because he is a presidential hopeful, but because it's a genuinely interesting story. From his early childhood growing up as a black child in a white family in Hawaii to his work with the poor and disenfranchised later in life. Unlike other political bios this one does not read like a 'vote for me' polemic.

A very readable account of Barack Obama's early life - his journey to Kenya to meet his half brothers and sisters and learn more about the father he hardly knew. An insight into the shaping of the character of the man who will now have a great influence on the lives of many people.