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| Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
Hardcover
Author: Barack Obama
Publisher: Crown
Release Date: 2007-01-09
ISBN-10: 0307383415
ISBN-13: 9780307383419
List Price: $25.95
Average Customer Rating:
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Great Speeches by African Americans: Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Barack Obama, and Others (Thrift Edition)
ISBN-10: 0486447618
ISBN-13: 9780486447612
List Price:$3.50
Barack Obama: An American Story: An American Story (All Aboard Reading)
ISBN-10: 0448447991
ISBN-13: 9780448447995
List Price:$3.99
Hopes and Dreams: The Story of Barack Obama
ISBN-10: 1579127568
ISBN-13: 9781579127565
List Price:$9.95
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Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
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.
I won't vote for him, but I vote for this true-life story.
| Customer Rating: | Every voter should read this book, because everyone should know who it is they are voting for or against. What defines this candidate? Not merely a set of position papers. In my case, I am voting against Senator Obama. That does not make his book any less valuable and compelling. Now more than ever I know why I am making another choice.
Some of Obama's musings in between the strictly narrative sections can be a bit ponderous. The scenes of his life, as described in this book, are full of detail, highly readable, novel-like. As such, they strike me as having been embellished, because only a man with photographic memory could accurately remember conversations and thoughts and feelings in such detail. However, I'll give Obama the benefit of the doubt that these scenes are truthfully described according to his overall memory. And frankly, I doubt the book would be as readable if such fine details were not included, whether they are strictly accurate to the letter or not.
I see a parallel between Obama's life history and his political philosophy. Obama longed to know his absent father. Obama looks to government as more than "Uncle Sam." Government is to be Daddy to us all. Progressives may sympathize with this view, and libertarians/conservatives will recoil from it. Nevertheless, Obama's early "community organizer" days are well-covered in this book, and from the start Obama looked upon government as a solution to nearly every problem (housing, schooling, jobs, health, etc.). It is unclear to me what evidence leads Obama to believe this can ever truly lift poor minorities out of their miseries, when it seems so clear that character and lifestyle choices can undermine any gifts or advantages the government may bestow on poor communities. And that without families -- read intact families with present, functional fathers -- most poor children will never reach their full potential, unlike Mr. Obama.
Also, it is clear from the description of Barack's first service in Jeremiah Wright's church in chapter 14 that Barack was fully aware of the reverend's "blame the white man" tendencies from the start. Those tendencies may not have been addressed then in the offensive manner that ultimately got so much media attention, but the die was plainly cast. Did Wright really bring Obama literally to tears with that first sermon? I believe he may have, as described in the book.
There's no way any of us can really walk in Obama's shoes, but this book is the next best thing. Barack describes an inside view of what it was like to grow up black in American society, yet also feeling an outsider because of his multinational, multiracial origins and upbringing. It is good for all of us, of all political persuasions, to understand those kinds of struggles, and to honor Senator Obama for all he has overcome, and for his intentions to try to change things for the better.
How the reader ultimately views Obama's methods for achieving such change will depend a lot on the philosophical premises he or she brings to the reading. Still, this book is an effective tool for understanding the origin of candidate Obama's personal ambitions and his politics, whether you like them or not. Further, it serves as a sore reminder of the mental and emotional plague that is inflicted on children when their fathers are distant or completely missing in action. If only all men could understand that before they become fathers!
Barack Obama is a rich man now. For writing this book, he deserves to be. There are lessons for all of us here. |
Regina's Soul
| Customer Rating: | | Barack Obama is an incredible story teller. Reading "Dreams from My Father" was a most enlightening experience. By the time we got to Africa I felt like Obama was a dear friend sharing his life with me. Meeting family for the first time in Africa felt like me going home to meet my ancestors. The reading was delicious and I didn't want it to end. I urge my family and friends to meet the man who is making history and spend some quality time with him. It feels honest and it's so obvious that it was written before there were any presidential aspirations. A documented story of a man before any publicity spin. |
A peak inside the man.
| Customer Rating: | | I have officially drank the cool-aide and think Obama is fantastic. Superbly written, wonderful insights into modern racial issues soulful and deeply honest. He has my vote! |
i loved it but it took me forever
| Customer Rating:  | | i love this book and i think the writing is amazing. idont know how he found time to write all of this but it was amazing. on the other hand it took me foreever. esepily the chacogo part. it was still amazing |
Disappointing
| Customer Rating: | I read this book because I wanted to know more about Obama. I wanted (and expected) to like him, but unfortunately I was disappointed. This book has a very whiny, "poor me" kind of tone. Not to say that black people don't have a tough time, but there seems to be a lot of blaming "the white man" and "white folks" in general. News flash: we "white folks" don't just sit around plotting how we can make black folks' lives difficult.
Recommended reading: The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes |
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