★★★★ (of 5)

• Full Title: Dreams From My Father: A Story Of Race And Inheritance
• Author: Barack Obama
• Year: 1995 (mine was 2004 trade paperback)
• Pages: 442
• Genre: Memoir, Autobiography
• Publisher: Broadway Paperbacks
• ISBN 978-1-4000-8277-3 (trade paperback)
• Wikipedia page
• Author’s Wikipedia page

 

Summary

This memoir, published while Obama was running for a seat in the Illinois State Senate in 1995, was originally supposed to be about “race relations” — the contract was offered to him after his selection as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review in 1990. In the introduction, Obama provides his initial concept for the book:

“There would be an essay on the limits of civil rights litigation in bringing about racial equality, thoughts on the meaning of community and the restoration of public life through grassroots organizing, musings on affirmative action and Afrocentrism... I’d include personal anecdotes, to be sure, and analyze the sources of certain recurring emotions. But all in all it was an intellectual journey that I imagined for myself, complete with maps and restpoints and a strict itinerary...”

—page xiii-xiv

In the end, though he says he resisted, he couldn’t help but write about “a personal, interior journey — a boy’s search for his father, and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American.” The narrative begins when Obama was 21 years old and received a phone call from Kenya, a distant relative informing him that his father has died. From there, Obama circles back to his childhood, and then further. He recounts what it felt like to grow up never knowing exactly who he was or where he was from — and leads the reader on his personal journey of discovery.

In some ways, it speaks of what most of us go through at some point — that process of finding oneself, determining who we are and who we are going to be. In other ways, Obama identifies his own experience with that of black Americans in general. And in still more ways his experience was somewhat unusual and unique: growing up with a white mother and white grandparents in Hawaii, but then suddenly getting an Indonesian step-dad and moving to Jakarta, moving back to Hawaii to attend an elite private school, briefly meeting his Kenyan father. It was quite a journey, ending with a lengthy and cathartic visit with his extended family in Kenya.

In 2006, Obama won a Grammy for his audiobook version of Dreams From My Father.

 

Praise

Though it’s been seven years since I read The Audacity Of Hope (2006) and my memory of it has dimmed (I do remember that I liked it), I believe this 1995 book is better. The prose is more lyrical and fluid, feeling more than thinking, and evocative in a way he simply couldn’t have written 11 years later when he was a sitting U.S. Senator. It is drastically more personal and painful than any other memoir or autobiography I’ve read — especially by politicians; in fact due to the intense introspection, it felt like an entirely different category or genre.

 

Points Off For...

I couldn’t take off points for anything specific; it’s a good book. Where in other books I might remove points for repeated use of the N-word, in this one I suspect it was used appropriately — a very rare situation in my opinion. I withheld the fifth star only due to principle; the book wasn’t spectacular or world-changing.

 

Personal Connections

I couldn’t help but notice a couple of connections. Not only was I born in the same hospital (this one — it’s “Kapiolani Hospital” on my birth certificate) as Obama, but he had moved back to Hawaii and was living in Honolulu by the time I was born — I like to think that in a city of only 300,000 people, as it was at the time, that he and I might have crossed paths incidentally while I was a toddler.

 

Conclusion

Though I can likely never fully understand some of what Obama touched on in this book, I was impressed with his telling of his own journey and I’m glad I read it. I would recommend it to anyone — even people opposed to him politically; this was written before he was a politician and almost never touches on politics.

 

 

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