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Yuya Kiuchi

Barack Obama

Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance Paperback – 3 Jun. 2007

by Barack Obama (Author)

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Barack Obama: Dreams from My Father (A Story of Race and Inheritance)
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The son of a black African father and a white American mother, Obama was only two years old when his father walked out on the family. Many years later, Obama receives a phone call from Nairobi: his father is dead. This sudden news inspires an emotional odyssey for Obama, determined to learn the truth of his father's life and reconcile his divided inheritance. Written at the age of thirty-three, Dreams from my Father is an unforgettable read. it illuminates not only Obama's journey, but also our universal desire to understand our history, and what makes us the people we are.

Print length

464 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Canongate Books
Publication date

3 Jun. 2007
Dimensions

13.6 x 3.3 x 21.5 cm
ISBN-10

1847670911
ISBN-13

978-1847670915
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Product description

Review

'Because he held to the good and transcended the bad, in Obama's genesis millions of us will find hope.'
-- The Times

'Obama has written a memoir...that evokes the anguish of miscegenation yet culminates in a cry of faith in human community.' -- Sunday Times

From the Back Cover

'At the time of his death, my father remained a myth to me, both more and less than a man.' Dreams from My Father is Barack Obama's remarkable memoir. The son of a black African father and a white American mother, Obama was only two years old when his father walked out on the family. Many years later, Obama receives a phone call from Nairobi: his father is dead. This sudden news inspires an emotional odyssey for Obama, determined to learn the truth of his father's life and reconcile his divided inheritance. Written at the age of thirty-three, long before Obama had thoughts of a political career, Dreams from My Father is an unforgettable read. It illuminates not only Obama's journey, but also our universal desire to understand our history, and what makes us the people we are. 'This may be the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician.' Jo Klein, Time 'A bestseller because of its freshness and honesty.' Christopher Hitchens, Sunday Times 'Beautifully crafted . . . moving and candid.' Scott Turow CANON#GATE www.canongate.net £12.99 ISBN 978 1 84767 091 5

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Canongate Books; Main edition (3 Jun. 2007)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 464 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1847670911
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1847670915
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.6 x 3.3 x 21.5 cm

Customer reviews:
4.4 9,940 ratings

About the authors

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Yuya Kiuchi
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Yuya Kiuchi is an assistant professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at Michigan State University. His research areas include: African American Studies and History, American Studies and History, Popular Culture Studies, Urban History, Youth Culture, and Science Technology and Society Studies.
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Barack Obama
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Barack Obama was the 44th president of the United States, elected in November 2008 and holding office for two terms. He is the author of three New York Times bestselling books, Dreams from My Father, The Audacity of Hope, and A Promised Land, and is the recipient of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Michelle. They have two daughters, Malia and Sasha.
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Katy P

A wonderful writer

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 3 July 2023

Verified Purchase

We all knew that Barack Obama was an excellent orator, having listened to his speeches - over the years.
His views, delivery and intellect always came across - when listening to him.

As a writer he is even more impressive!
His wording is beautiful, poetic - in a very good way.
I hesitated whether to buy his book, but I am so very glad I have - he is one of the best politician-writers I have ever had the good fortune to read the book of!

Extremely warmly recommend reading this book, which he wrote, before even contemplating running for the presidency.

It's honest, unique and his writing is up at the best level!

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Ralph Blumenau

In search of identity

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 8 September 2008

Verified Purchase

This book has been written with great literary flair. Every place in which Barack Obama has lived or which he has visited is described with the skill of a great travel-writer; every person, every social setting is graphically and memorably brought to life. His independently-minded maternal grandparents, white folk who had themselves eloped against the wishes of the grandmother's father, had no theory about racial equality but simply assumed it and were shocked when their surroundings did not. Apart from the fact that the grandfather had itchy feet, that may have been one of the reasons why they left Texas and moved to Hawaii, which was more racially tolerant than mainland America. When their daughter married Barack senior, a black Kenyan whom she had met at the University of Hawaii, they accepted him. It was a brief marriage: he left his wife and his brown-skinned two-year-old son, Barack junior, to study in America, and never returned to live with them. Two years later she married an Indonesian (another superb pen-portrait), and when Barack was six years old, they all went off to live in a village on the edge of Djakarta. Barack learnt a lot from his step-father and from life in Indonesia under a savage right-wing dictatorship. He also learnt much from his mother, who counteracted the step-father's fatalistic acceptance of the situation in Indonesia by constantly setting before her son the struggles of the American liberals in the 1960s and 1970s. Her second marriage, too, would end in divorce. She sent Barack back to Hawaii when he was ten, to be educated at a good American school there.

Even in Hawaii where there was more racial mixing than anywhere else in the United States, there were many incidents which taught the adolescent Barack that he was a black person in essentially a white man's world, and there was one incident in which he found that even his beloved grandmother was afraid of a black beggar when she would not have been of a white one. It was a shattering discovery for a youngster whose mother and grandparents were white: to which world did he really belong? He was still confused and angry at college in Los Angeles; and then he realized that he was going in for self-dramatization (and, to some extent, I feel he had not fully overcome it in this book). There was no need for him to be trapped in that kind of drama - some of his more mature black fellow-students taught him that. His identity was surely something more than was defined above all by his race.

But that was easier said than found, or perhaps even really wanted at that time. He wanted to identify himself with a community, and initially this was a black community. So in 1983, at the age of 22, he joined a community organization in Chicago, and the second part of the book is about his time there. Things had started looking up for black people in that city. They were immensely proud of the election of the first black mayor, Harold Washington; anti-discrimination laws in the public sector had enabled some blacks to move to the more prosperous areas of the city (only to find that the whites were moving out); but in run-down districts like Altgeld there was still a huge pool of hopelessness. Some alienated youngsters had created their own gun-culture, and it was uphill and disheartening work for Barack and the community leaders to get people to come together to do something to help themselves, and also to pressure the authorities. After a year's hard work there were some small successes to celebrate (each movingly narrated), and each bringing in new participants, and also set-backs - which lost some of them again.

For some of Barack's colleagues, total rejection of white society was the only way in which black `self-respect' could express itself. Barack understood the psychological need for this; but - not only because of his own background - felt that self-respect cannot be based simply on what was essentially a generalized hatred for and separation from a society in which blacks were enmeshed with whites in a thousand practical and inescapable ways.

After three years as a Community Organizer, Barack thought he could be of more use to the black community if he took time off to train as a lawyer. He won a place at the Harvard Law School; but before he took it up, he paid his first visit to Kenya in 1987; and the account of that visit takes up the third part of this book. In America he had already met a half-sister with whom he established an instant rapport (a most touching account, that), and now he met the rest of his very extended and complicated family (Barack Senior had fathered eight children from four different women), with all their rivalries and resentments, but also with their warmth. From the third wife of his grandfather he learnt the whole story of his Kenyan family. If he had visited Kenya in search of roots, his perplexities and self-questioning did not diminish - but that aspect is not the only one in this vivid account of his visit to the country.

The book is a reflection of a sensitive and thoughtful man of mixed race in America. In 1995, when it was first published and Barack Obama was 33 years old, he still seemed very uncertain of who he was, was focussed on the problems of the black community in the United States and then on his Kenyan heritage. Today he seems very confident and sure of his identity, campaigning for the Presidency on a programme that transcends any question of race. In more ways than one, he has come a long way.

36 people found this helpful

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San Patch

Honest, Refreshing Reflection on Youth and Identity

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 25 July 2009

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If this book is a reflection of Barack Obama's personality, then it is no wonder that he ran his presidential campaign with courage, poise and with a keen sense of the public mood. I was truly impressed with his personal story, his sound intellectual foundation, which seems to be partly genetic (both his father and mother had Ph.D's), and his calm - almost too calm - approach to the problems that dogged him in his youth.

Everyone knows Barack Obama's story by now, so I am not going to rehash it in this review. What Dreams of My Father reveals, however, is Barack Obama's struggle for identity in a country that is obsessed with race and identity. The principal influences on his life seem to have been his mother, his Indonesian step-father, his maternal grandparents and his absentee father.

Dreams of My Father is a very personal story of how Barack Obama struggles to hew out meaning from his multiple racial and cultural heritages. As a boy living in Indonesia, he seemed to soak in the sights and sounds of this tropical 'paradise'. However, it was clear to him that all was not well in 'paradise. He was impressed by his step-father's hard-headedness as he climbed up the ladder of achievement in Indonesia. As a teenager living in the United States, he never seemed to fit in; he was always on the outside looking in - not quite white, and yet, not quite black. He seemed to have made a conscious effort to identify himself as a Black Man without falling for the crass stereotypes that this identify entails.

The book ends with his 'homecoming' to Kenya to meet his father's extended family after his father's depth. Unlike many African-Americans for whom Africa is just an idea - of ancient kingdoms, warrior clans and proud histories, which serve as an anchor for their sense of dislocation in America, Obama's experience in Kenya served to heal an open wound: not knowing who his father was. His 'homecoming' seemed to have helped him close the loop on a troubled Odyssey in search of identity.

Dreams of My Father is a refreshing, 'unputdownable' read. I loved every page of the book. Obama tells the story of his life with honesty, fluency and pathos. He does an excellent job of expressing his original sense of dislocation, which is inextricably linked to the African American experience, and his subsequent journey to find his place within American society. There is no anger, no recrimination, no political-correctness; this is just the story of a man who, like Simba in Disney's Lion King, finally takes in place in the circle of life.

As an African, I salute Barack Obama and the possibility that he embodies; Dreams of My Father has challenged me, more than any other autobiography that I have read. It deserves my 4 stars.

6 people found this helpful

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Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance Paperback – 3 Jun. 2007

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