Customer Reviews

Dreams from My Father

5 star:		(413)
4 star:		(111)
3 star:		(42)
2 star:		(21)
1 star:		(35)

 

 

U.S. Senate hopeful Barack Obama has an inspiring story to share, and yet he doesn't simply rest on his laurels in this critical evaluation of his life and in his continuing search for himself as a black American. He wrote "Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance" almost ten years ago, but his stock has obviously surged since his star-making speech at the Democratic National Convention last month, perhaps to the chagrin of Hillary Clinton...unless she is dreaming of a Clinton-Obama ticket in 2008! Growing up mulatto in Hawaii and Indonesia, Obama discusses trying to come to grips with his racial identity through a period of rebellion that included drug use, becoming a community activist in Chicago and traveling to Kenya to understand his father's past. It is in Kenya where he discovers a nation with forty different tribes, each of them saddled with stereotypes of the others. It is also in Kenya where he recognizes the dichotomy that has been his lifelong existence between the graves of his father and his grandfather. His description of this defining moment is worthy of a passage in Alex Haley's "Roots".

Obama is also candid about racism, poverty and corruption in Chicago, and he pulls no punches in his account of this period. Because the book stops in 1995, it does not get into much detail on his learning experiences, culminating in both missteps and triumphs, as a state legislator. For all the value the book provides on Obama's history, I would have appreciated a more substantive update than the preface on the last decade, as he gained political prominence in Illinois, so that we understand more why his time in the spotlight has come at this moment. Perhaps that will be Volume 2. I was also disappointed he spent so little time writing about his mother and the influence her side of the family has had on him, a narrative gap Obama acknowledges and over which he expresses regret in the preface. Perhaps inclusion of such details would have made for a less compelling story from his originally intended Afro-centric perspective; but at the same time, I think a more balanced look at his own racial dichotomy would have made his story resonate all the more given where he is now.

Obama is open in the preface about using changed names and composite characters to expedite the flow and ensure privacy of those around him, but it does somewhat lessen the impact of his story when one starts to wonder who was real and who was a fictionalized character. Regardless of these literary devices, this book is still a very worthwhile look into the background of someone who is on a major upward trajectory in the current national political scene.

I first heard Barack Obama's command of the English language in his address before the Democratic National Convention. His speech brought to mind leaders of the past who had the eloquence and passion to light a fire in people with words alone. When I saw his book, I bought it to read more of his firey, inspirational leadership. What I got instead is an insightful, sometimes painfully honest apprisal of the beginnings of that leader's life, and it surprised me. This book was written when Sen. Obama was just out of Law School. He was offered a publishing deal after being elected the first black President of the Harvard Law Review. What he wrote is a memoir that is very obviously written by a brilliant young man. I say brilliant because his observations and examinations on racial constructs and communications in America is astute and deeply personal. As a bi-racial man growing up in both white and black America, his viewpoint is unique and his eyes were wide open. I say young because unlike most memoirs written after great accomplishments and long careers, the voice of this story is at the beginning of what may be greatness, not the end. Obama gets a chance to look back and examine his formation, and in doing so gives a beautiful and wonderfully full 'state-of-the-union' as regarding race. It's not the same old stuff, and it is. It felt like my favorite college professors who could make you stop in the middle of a class and realize that you just saw something you thought you knew in a whole new light, and you could never see it the old way again.

I highly recommend this book to almost everyone. It should really get more attention!

The writing is thoughtful and interesting, and the subject matter unique. The book follows Barack Obama as he grows up and defines himself and his view of the world, as he finds the community that he wants to count himself a member of. In the end that "community" is really the community of humanity, but this book takes you on Barack's journey.

The author examines his heritage of white, midwesterners on his mother's side and later in the book explores the world of his father, a Kenya of the Luo tribe who came to the U.S. to study. Three parts of the book I found especially well done. First, the evocation of what it was like to be in Barack's head as a young black man with few black role models in his life and the difficult philosophical (internal) conversation of the African-American community defining itself in white America. Second, his work as a community organizer in Chicago really dealt well with the complex problems of declining inner cities. Third, the idealization of his absent father by both himself and his mother and the gradual discovery of the real character of his father and grandfather.

Overall, this book was about his struggle to be true to himself and to figure out what that meant.

Barack Obama is obviously an articulate, intelligent man; but his "story of race and inheritance" may leave readers scratching their heads at times. The story of his life, the son of a Kenyan man and a white woman who divorced when he was a young child, is atypical. His father, an extremely book smart man, polygamist, big talker and eventually sometimes embarrassment to the family who was known as the Old Man to his many children, seems an unlikely source of the "dreams" of which the title speaks. The author met his father but once, when he was ten years old. Dr. Barack Obama was already married (p 422) when he met his namesake's mother while studying in the States. He returned to Africa alone, married again (and again) and had more children. His mother then married (and later divorced) an Indonesian man and they moved to Djakarta, where he spent his early years until moving in with his maternal grandparents in Hawaii. He ended up in Chicago, where he signed on to help organize African-Americans to work together to gain funding for projects to improve the quality of their lives and those of their children. Three years and much success (after a bumpy start) later, he headed off to graduate school, but not before finally attending services at a large, popular, local church. Readers may wonder if, during the several page section rounding out Part 2 (Chicago), he may have experienced some sort of spiritual awakening: the signs pointing ambiguously to "maybe," making one wonder why the event was included at all. The latter thirty percent of the book covers his first trip to Kenya (his father having already passed away) and his interactions with a convoluted web of relatives: aunts, uncles, cousins, and half and step siblings: the details of which, although unusual, will probably be of no more interest to readers than the tales of their own genealogical connections (a family tree would have been clarifying). Although Dreams From My Father is a good story about a smart, well-intentioned, accomplished man (with complicated family connections) who has lived an interesting life, its hard not to question his focus on his (absent) father in lieu of his mother.

This is NOT the usual self-serving "autobiography" of a politician that was ghost-written by his speechwriter and rushed into print just before the primaries. In this lyrical, beautifully written memoir, a young man struggles to come to terms with his heritage as a child of biracial parents. It is unusually honest, even noting in an afterword where his memory clashes with that of his sister: did he meet her in an airport or a bus station? There is a painful rawness as he speaks of Kansas, which shaped his grandparents, of Hawaii, where his parents met and parted, of Indonesia where his mother remarried, of returning to Hawaii to live with his grandparents and go to school. He touches upon the wounds of youthful rebellion, of pulling back from the brink.

He says little of his mother but one can get a sense of the strength and compassion of her character by the fact that she raised her son to admire and see greatness in the character of the man who had abandoned her--who had in fact other wives. He visited only once, when the author was ten. Later, as an adult, the author travels to Kenya, his father's country and meets his sister and his African relatives. He learns that his father was not the man he thought and that although his father had potential, it was never realized.

The author returns to America to wrestle with the issue of his brown skin and how some people in America react to that. There is self-discovery on all levels of this reflective book. To write like this a man must grapple with the demons of his own soul and emerge victorious. It's the kind of journey and coming of age that equips a hero to slay monsters, I think.

This book is not about politics. If you are interested in Obama's political philosophy, turn to The Audacity of Hope.

Please, don't get me wrong, I loved this book. Obama's style and matter-of-fact realism is both refreshing and, at times, inspiring. The only reason why this book isn't 4+ stars, is because of the expectations that this book leads the reader to believe.

What I mean is that by reading the summary and back cover, the reader expects to experience a man torn between two cultures and belonging to neither. And while Obama does clearly illustrate his trepidation with associating himself with either culture, from the very beginning we learn that Obama, for all intents and purposes, held his black heritage in a different regard. He was not torn so much as distraught, growing up in a 'white' world unfamiliar with his black background. From reading this book, the reader does not get the sense of Obama'a sturggle with his white roots. The story is rather a search for answers on how to live as a black man in a white world. I believe that Obama missed the chance of opening the doors to a wholely different and misunerstood world of children of differing cultures. In this 'melting pot' that we call America, there is a constant struggle between race and ethnicity and Obama could have set himself up as an educator, a leader of those who had no home. Yet, from the beginning, Obama was at home in his black heritage, but he just was looking for the key.

I would have liked the book to delve into his personal life more. It seemed to just skim the surface.Of course,it was written several years ago. He has certainly led an interesting life, but I was left wanting more.

...which I read before anyone began to take Obama's chances of being nominated for president seriously. Still, it had the tenor of a campaign biography -- careful, modest, strategic, and yes, evasive at times. The most any campaign biography ever provides is a sense of the subject's priorities; in other words, you won't find many clues to Obama's specific positions on world issues in the account of his childhood. You will, however, get a feeling of the man, and you will discover an American who has far wider experience of other cultures, and far greater optimism about a multi-cultural society, than any other politician on the scene. Those who proclaim that Obama lacks "experience" in foreign policy are dead wrong; one strong foundation for foreign policy is a knowledge of the rest of the world based on first-hand experience.

I'm reviewing this book today because I found a story in the morning newspaper, telling how young Obama supporters on the internet are adding his middle name, Hussein, to their tags and even to the real names. Hey, I'm a young supporter at heart! Henceforth, call me Giordano Hussein Bruno!

Many months later, post victory: With President Obama getting 65% approval from the American people, and showing every sign of being thoroughly moderate and main-stream by world piolitical and economic norms, I have only one thing to offer the ranters and ravers of the Limblather sort: a huge horse laugh!

The next US Senator from the state of Illinois wrote this book nearly a decade ago, before his rapid rise to political power. Before anyone outside of Chicago's South Side knew who he was, Obama wrote a remarkably personal account of his childhood and life up to that time.

The subtitle of the book is "A Story of Race and Inheritance," but it seems that the book is really about identity. Obama writes freely on "the puzzle of being a black man," which is compounded for him by the fact that his mother is American-born and his father is from Kenya. He lives in Hawaii, then abroad in Indonesia for part of his childhood, reinforcing the fact that he is from two worlds but belongs to neither. He meets his father only once, around age ten. The author then wends through life up to his late twenties not knowing who his father really was. The point at which he finds out about his father's weaknesses is one of the more explosive moments of the book. Obama shares even this darkest moment with us.

Obama writes frankly about his idle years as a teen, his past fondness for pot and for liquor, but these preoccupations fade for him as he finds purpose to his life. He gives up a successful job in New York to work on the streets as an organizer, where he helps mainly poor blacks fight for fair housing and educational opportunities. But in spite of his passion for this work, his life is still incomplete. He writes, "my identity might begin with the fact of my race but it didn't, couldn't, end there."

The pinnacle of Obama's young life was finally visiting his African family in Kenya, and although his father has already passed away, he has left behind a large group of people - - Obama's people - - who claim him as one of their own. It is during this trip where he receives his inheritance, which is not his father's practically nonexistent and disputed estate, but the wealth of information about generations past. Shortly after his first African trip, where this account ends, Obama begins Harvard Law School.

If it seems incredibly rare to find this level of candor in a political biography or autobiography, it's because the book is an autobiography about a man before he gained political ambition. This is what makes this book stand out so boldly from the genre: That a man could share some of the deepest parts of himself years before he sought high office is rare indeed. The 2004 edition of this book contains a new preface by the author.

Though I am not an American citizen and therefore I do not get a vote in the Nov election, I still find Obama an inspiring and interesting person.

As for the book, it's interesting but not that engaging. It should be noted that the book was written over ten years ago and is not about his recent public political success and more about a young black boy growing up in Hawaii and Indonesia being raised by a white mother and her white grandparents.

I found the real star of the book is Barack's mother. What an amazing woman. She put everything into raising him. At the beginning of the book, Barack writes, had he known his mother would not survive her cancer illness, he may have instead written a book about her (as a great parent) and not about the absent one.

The book is about growing up, making decisions and reconciliation - going back to Africa to meet his brothers, sisters and grandparents.

Growing up in Hawaii is the first part of the book. Going to university in California and New York is the second part of the book and the final part is Barack going home to meet his relatives. I find the latter half was better than the first half.

Reading the book, I found it astounding the level of detail he goes into describing each scene and what everyone said. I later learned that names of characters have been changed to protect their privacy and the story is an approximation of what happened. Barack is quite the storyteller.

I thought the book could have been edited a bit as it was long.

Interesting read as I didn't realize how strong he feels attached to his black roots. There is so much separation in every scene who is black who is white. I was surprised by that. Very strong lines drawn between blacks and whites in his opinions.

Overall, if you want to know about the man before age 25, and how he formed his views and values, I think you may find this book to be an interesting insight. It's not a page-turner but it does provide insight into the man and his thought processes.