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

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance | Barack Obama | EXCEPTIONAL ON VIRTUALLY EVERY LEVEL

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	Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance Barack Obama Canongate Books, 2007 - 442 pages average customer review:based on 298 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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.

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Dreams From My Father

This is the most compelling story that really resonates with me. Barak Obama's life connects with a little bit of everyone no matter your race or background. In his book, Barak Obama articulates the near and distant relationships specifically with his grandparents and estranged parents, which ultimately shaped his character to what it is now; open, inclusive and inspirational. After reading this book, I knew that this was no ordinary man. If an ordinary man he is certainly destined for extraordinary things. He is genuine and open about his past even the troubling part he tells about his youth. You Must Read! I was spell bound, once you start reading you won't stop until finished. Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

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EXCEPTIONAL ON VIRTUALLY EVERY LEVEL

Out of all the autobiographies I've read of prominent men and women, and particularly those wih political ambition and desire for high office, I don't think I've ever read anything as frank and straightforward as this book of Obama's. Writing about oneself is difficult for most people most of the time, and here, describing one's childhood (or bi-racial childhood as Americans often say) involves displaying whatever conclusions you've reached as you assenbked your emotional and intellectual self, in different parts of this country, and in Indonesia, and that must surely have been profoundly difficult.

Considering the high level of education Obama's achieved, that the book is written well should be no surprise. But what is so amazing about all this is that currently the election campaign of Obama's Republican opponent is attempting to encourage the voting public that there is an impenetrable veil of mystery surrounding candidate Obama; mystery about his morals, his political affiliations, his religious obligations.. It seems obvious to me that anybody in this country or this world could find the man revealed with maximum clarity simply by reading this exceptional book. The latest Republican hocus-pocus is nonsense. It depends on the shameful racist tradition that says no white person can ever accept any level of intimacy -- certainly not an equitable one -- with any person of color, and that understanding would be a breach of caste.

We will be reading this splendid book for many years, both as adults and as students and children. It will become a young people's library classic.

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Poetic Introspection

This amazingly frank memoir bares the soul of a confused and deprived, then ambitious and determined, man of his times. The multi-racial, multi-cultural, migratory experience of Barack Obama both reflects and defines the post-modern secular society that the United States has become in the 21st century. This masterfully told tale transcends the senator's own life to illustrate the trials and pain of the racial divide that persist both here and abroad. It portrays the chronically sad consequences of tribal and colonial history for Africans, Europeans and Americans.

By turns troubling yet hopeful, morose yet humourous, depressing yet inspiring, this book probes your emotions and challenges your worldview. Obama weaves an incredible tapestry of characters, places and moods with language more befitting a poet than a politician. His look inside himself is as deep and penetrating as his thoughts about the human condition. Although not everyone will agree with his conclusions, no one can deny his convictions.

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