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Barack Obama

Yuya Kiuchi

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance Hardcover – January 9, 2007

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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • ONE OF ESSENCE’S 50 MOST IMPACTFUL BLACK BOOKS OF THE PAST 50 YEARS

In this iconic memoir of his early days, Barack Obama “guides us straight to the intersection of the most serious questions of identity, class, and race” (The Washington Post Book World).

“Quite extraordinary.”—Toni Morrison

In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father—a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man—has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey—first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance.

Praise for Dreams from My Father

“Beautifully crafted . . . moving and candid . . . This book belongs on the shelf beside works like James McBride’s The Color of Water and Gregory Howard Williams’s Life on the Color Line as a tale of living astride America’s racial categories.”—Scott Turow

“Provocative . . . Persuasively describes the phenomenon of belonging to two different worlds, and thus belonging to neither.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Obama’s writing is incisive yet forgiving. This is a book worth savoring.”—Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here

“One of the most powerful books of self-discovery I’ve ever read, all the more so for its illuminating insights into the problems not only of race, class, and color, but of culture and ethnicity. It is also beautifully written, skillfully layered, and paced like a good novel.”—Charlayne Hunter-Gault, author of In My Place

“Dreams from My Father is an exquisite, sensitive study of this wonderful young author’s journey into adulthood, his search for community and his place in it, his quest for an understanding of his roots, and his discovery of the poetry of human life. Perceptive and wise, this book will tell you something about yourself whether you are black or white.”—Marian Wright Edelman

Print length

442 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Crown
Publication date

January 9, 2007
Dimensions

9.3 x 6.3 x 1.5 inches
ISBN-10

0307383415
ISBN-13

978-0307383419
Lexile measure

1010L
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Popular Highlights in this book

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To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear.
Highlighted by 903 Kindle readers
“Sometimes you can’t worry about hurt. Sometimes you worry only about getting where you have to go.”
Highlighted by 811 Kindle readers
She had taught me to disdain the blend of ignorance and arrogance that too often characterized Americans abroad.
Highlighted by 799 Kindle readers

Editorial Reviews

Review

• ?;“Fluidly, calmly, insightfully, Obama guides us straight to the intersection of the most serious questions of identity, class, and race.”
—Washington Post Book World

“Beautifully crafted…moving and candid…This book belongs on the shelf beside works like James McBride’s The Color of Water and Greg Williams’s Life on the Color Line as a tale of living astride America’s racial categories.”
—Scott Turow

“Provocative…Persuasively describes the phenomenon of belonging to two different worlds, and thus belonging to neither.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“One of the most powerful books of self-discovery I’ve ever read, all the more so for its illuminating insights into the problems not only of race, class, and color, but of culture and ethnicity. It is also beautifully written, skillfully layered, and paced like a good novel.”
—Charlayne Hunter-Gault

“In Dreams from My Father Barack Obama takes us on a probing journey in a search for the truths about family and race. Obama’s writing is incisive yet forgiving. This is a book worth savoring.”
—Alex Kotlowitz

“Dreams from My Father is an exquisite, sensitive study of this wonderful young author’s journey into adulthood, his search for community and his place in it, his quest for an understanding of his roots, and his discovery of the poetry of human life. Perceptive and wise, this book will tell you something about yourself whether you are black or white.”
—Marian Wright Edelman

About the Author

Barack Obama was the 44th president of the United States, elected in November 2008 and holding office for two terms. He is the recipient of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize and the New York Times bestselling author of Dreams from My Father, The Audacity of Hope, and A Promised Land. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Michelle. They have two daughters, Malia and Sasha.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Preface to the 2004 Edition

Almost a decade has passed since this book was first published. As I mention in the original introduction, the opportunity to write the book came while I was in law school, the result of my election as the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. In the wake of some modest publicity, I received an advance from a publisher and went to work with the belief that the story of my family, and my efforts to understand that story, might speak in some way to the fissures of race that have characterized the American experience, as well as the fluid state of identity -- the leaps through time, the collision of cultures -- that mark our modern life.

Like most first-time authors, I was filled with hope and despair upon the book’s publication -- hope that the book might succeed beyond my youthful dreams, despair that I had failed to say anything worth saying. The reality fell somewhere in between. The reviews were mildly favorable. People actually showed up at the readings my publisher arranged. The sales were underwhelming. And, after a few months, I went on with the business of my life, certain that my career as an author would be short-lived, but glad to have survived the process with my dignity more or less intact.

I had little time for reflection over the next ten years. I ran a voter registration project in the 1992 election cycle, began a civil rights practice, and started teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago. My wife and I bought a house, were blessed with two gorgeous, healthy, and mischievous daughters, and struggled to pay the bills. When a seat in the state legislature opened up in 1996, some friends persuaded me to run for the office, and I won. I had been warned, before taking office, that state politics lacks the glamour of its Washington counterpart; one labors largely in obscurity, mostly on topics that mean a great deal to some but that the average man or woman on the street can safely ignore (the regulation of mobile homes, say, or the tax consequences of farm equipment depreciation). Nonetheless, I found the work satisfying, mostly because the scale of state politics allows for concrete results -- an expansion of health insurance for poor children, or a reform of laws that send innocent men to death row -- within a meaningful time frame. And too, because within the capitol building of a big, industrial state, one sees every day the face of a nation in constant conversation: inner-city mothers and corn and bean farmers, immigrant day laborers alongside suburban investment bankers -- all jostling to be heard, all ready to tell their stories.

A few months ago, I won the Democratic nomination for a seat as the U.S. senator from Illinois. It was a difficult race, in a crowded field of well-funded, skilled, and prominent candidates; without organizational backing or personal wealth, a black man with a funny name, I was considered a long shot. And so, when I won a majority of the votes in the Democratic primary, winning in white areas as well as black, in the suburbs as well as Chicago, the reaction that followed echoed the response to my election to the Law Review. Mainstream commentators expressed surprise and genuine hope that my victory signaled a broader change in our racial politics. Within the black community, there was a sense of pride regarding my accomplishment, a pride mingled with frustration that fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education and forty years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, we should still be celebrating the possibility (and only the possibility, for I have a tough general election coming up) that I might be the sole African American -- and only the third since Reconstruction -- to serve in the Senate. My family, friends, and I were mildly bewildered by the attention, and constantly aware of the gulf between the hard sheen of media reports and the messy, mundane realities of life as it is truly lived.

Just as that spate of publicity prompted my publisher’s interest a decade ago, so has this fresh round of news clippings encouraged the book’s re-publication. For the first time in many years, I’ve pulled out a copy and read a few chapters to see how much my voice may have changed over time. I confess to wincing every so often at a poorly chosen word, a mangled sentence, an expression of emotion that seems indulgent or overly practiced. I have the urge to cut the book by fifty pages or so, possessed as I am with a keener appreciation for brevity. I cannot honestly say, however, that the voice in this book is not mine -- that I would tell the story much differently today than I did ten years ago, even if certain passages have proven to be inconvenient politically, the grist for pundit commentary and opposition research.

What has changed, of course, dramatically, decisively, is the context in which the book might now be read. I began writing against a backdrop of Silicon Valley and a booming stock market; the collapse of the Berlin Wall; Mandela -- in slow, sturdy steps -- emerging from prison to lead a country; the signing of peace accords in Oslo. Domestically, our cultural debates -- around guns and abortion and rap lyrics -- seemed so fierce precisely because Bill Clinton’s Third Way, a scaled-back welfare state without grand ambition but without sharp edges, seemed to describe a broad, underlying consensus on bread-and-butter issues, a consensus to which even George W. Bush’s first campaign, with its “compassionate conservatism,” would have to give a nod. Internationally, writers announced the end of history, the ascendance of free markets and liberal democracy, the replacement of old hatreds and wars between nations with virtual communities and battles for market share.

And then, on September 11, 2001, the world fractured.

It’s beyond my skill as a writer to capture that day, and the days that would follow -- the planes, like specters, vanishing into steel and glass; the slow-motion cascade of the towers crumbling into themselves; the ash-covered figures wandering the streets; the anguish and the fear. Nor do I pretend to understand the stark nihilism that drove the terrorists that day and that drives their brethren still. My powers of empathy, my ability to reach into another’s heart, cannot penetrate the blank stares of those who would murder innocents with abstract, serene satisfaction.

What I do know is that history returned that day with a vengeance; that, in fact, as Faulkner reminds us, the past is never dead and buried -- it isn’t even past. This collective history, this past, directly touches my own. Not merely because the bombs of Al Qaeda have marked, with an eerie precision, some of the landscapes of my life -- the buildings and roads and faces of Nairobi, Bali, Manhattan; not merely because, as a consequence of 9/11, my name is an irresistible target of mocking websites from overzealous Republican operatives. But also because the underlying struggle -- between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together, and those who would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us -- is the struggle set forth, on a miniature scale, in this book.

I know, I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago’s South Side, how narrow the path is for them between humiliation and untrammeled fury, how easily they slip into violence and despair. I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder -- alternating as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware -- is inadequate to the task. I know that the hardening of lines, the embrace of fundamentalism and tribe, dooms us all.

And so what was a more interior, intimate effort on my part, to understand this struggle and to find my place in it, has converged with a broader public debate, a debate in which I am professionally engaged, one that will shape our lives and the lives of our children for many years to come.

The policy implications of all this are a topic for another book. Let me end instead on a more personal note. Most of the characters in this book remain a part of my life, albeit in varying degrees -- a function of work, children, geography, and turns of fate.

The exception is my mother, whom we lost, with a brutal swiftness, to cancer a few months after this book was published.

She had spent the previous ten years doing what she loved. She traveled the world, working in the distant villages of Asia and Africa, helping women buy a sewing machine or a milk cow or an education that might give them a foothold in the world’s economy. She gathered friends from high and low, took long walks, stared at the moon, and foraged through the local markets of Delhi or Marrakesh for some trifle, a scarf or stone carving that would make her laugh or please the eye. She wrote reports, read novels, pestered her children, and dreamed of grandchildren.

We saw each other frequently, our bond unbroken. During the writing of this book, she would read the drafts, correcting stories that I had misunderstood, careful not to comment on my characterizations of her but quick to explain or defend the less flattering aspects of my father’s character. She managed her illness with grace and good humor, and she helped my sister and me push on with our lives, despite our dread, our denials, our sudden constrictions of the heart.

I think sometimes that had I known she would not survive her illness, I might have written a different book -- less a meditation on the absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life. In my daughters I see her every day, her joy, her capacity for wonder. I won’t try to describe how deeply I mourn her passing still. I know that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crown; Reprint edition (January 9, 2007)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 442 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0307383415
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0307383419
Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1010L
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.58 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #236,923 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #804 in Black & African American Biographies
- #1,103 in Political Leader Biographies
- #6,784 in Memoirs (Books)

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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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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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Olimba Smith

This book was masterful

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 25, 2023

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This is one of the best books I've read in 2023. If you want to learn about the young Barack Obama and who he was before he became President. I highly recommend this book.

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Jack

...a faith in other people a.k.a. sharing the struggle...

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 11, 2016

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I liked the persistent & stubborn self-awareness of the main character, called Barry by his family & friends, who ostensibly needed to recognize & consent or accept his inner emotional self for a multitude of conflicting cultural reasons, as someone he might like to know & learn to love, in perpetual pursuit of his chosen life’s work – in the profoundly thorough (1995) book by the not yet President of the United States, Barack Obama entitled, Dreams from My Father – A Story of Race and Inheritance.

I had to often remind myself while I read the book that I shouldn’t think about the penultimate conclusion, or that this was a precursor & not yet the actual or final ending to this young man’s remarkable legacy, in the many years before he became President in 2009, almost 15 years after the book was written in 1995, but the idea of a super-star status was never mentioned as even a possible pipe-dream in his Memoir.

I like Mr. Obama that much better now, as just a regular guy after reading his 1st of 2 books, since I have never met the man aka POTUS (President of the United States) in-person & can only surmise his current character from watching him intermittently in the news on TV; still a dream of mine for the past 8 years while he has been in residence in the White House, mostly just to shake his hand & offer some hopefully sensible utterances with regard to my admiration & gratitude, as well as some polite & respective well-wishes for his post-presidential profession. While this book review is a pre-production preparation for a letter I plan to write to the President, just to let him know that he will certainly be missed, in my estimation, after the election this year (in 2016) - but then again that’s another story.

I’d like to think I can identify with Mr. Obama’s journey of self-discovery, on some level, because I too am tall & have always felt or been told by others that I am thereby different & something I needed to fix in my apparently awkward state-of-affairs, by fearful, if not exasperated mindsets, who seem to rely on regulation labels before they can proceed with the uniform business at-hand. And the fact that Mr. Obama is smarter than most, helped & sometimes hindered his ability to find an easier way to answer his personal questions about race & inheritance, or whatever professional roles he was academically qualified for or subconsciously restricted by society to pursue.

I liked his adamant persistence to find an acceptable answer to every problem he needed to solve. Although, I was not so patient with the community service line-item on his resume, especially at the Altgeld Gardens Public Housing development in Chicago, since I didn’t have the required patience needed to wait so long for worrisome people to help themselves confront the elected powers that be, in order to fix something in a state of historic disrepair that should have been a foregone conclusion of sorts, or a regular procedure of anticipatory repairs. In other words, the owners of the Altgeld Gardens should have audited their property regularly for any subsequent repairs, in my adolescent opinion.

I waited albeit virtually & altogether impatiently with Barry in the background while he admirably engaged with everyone & anyone involved, in order to kick-start the up-keep, but nobody cared apparently, as much as Barry was a complete stranger on a mission of self-help who seemed more compelled to get the job done than the careless or too careful local residents. I immediately wanted to start fixing imaginary broken stuff around the place, while we waited infinitum for the city emissaries, so snug & secure in their suits & ties to make a better-late-then-never & last-minute appearance, just to cut a regulation ribbon to start the overdue removal process of the unseen & imaginatively bizarre amount of dangerous asbestos from so many kids’ hazardous bedrooms.

However, Mr. Obama achieved what he had set out to do on his vision quest of sorts (picked a profession & found a job & followed-thru in pursuit of self-satisfaction) & he also discovered another more apparent avenue of interest to explore (at Harvard), which may not have happened had he not chosen to live in Chicago, in the first place, all within the fantastic status of a particular predicament aka within the altercation of the Altgeld Gardens situation.

As Barry says in the book; ‘The continuing struggle to align word & action, our heartfelt desires with a workable plan – didn’t self-esteem finally depend on just this? It was that belief which had led me into organizing....’

Another favorite line about what I consider the opposite of arrogance when Barry concedes to the moment at-hand & unquestioningly gives attention to a wider unknown audience apart from himself & somewhere out there in the unknown universe, which parenthetically made me suddenly twitch as I realized something comparable, in my shaky effort to stop & persuasively think about what might also be the woeful matter in my own world, when Barry reminds himself about respect & contemplates the task of requisite self-awareness, as he says; ‘Look at yourself before you pass judgement. Don’t make someone else clean up your mess. It’s not (always) about you.’ I had to add the word, (always), because most of us need to relinquish however many self-centered reasons, that it’s almost always about ourselves, once again in my guilty opinion!

There are lots of good words of wisdom within the book to ponder, still his personal scenarios might not be so familiar or quite comfy for everybody all of the time, but that is the measure of what a wise & eventually great man once imagined, somewhere I’m sure, about the best thing we should do as individuals on this overpopulated & getting-smaller-by-the-minute tiny blue planet, to stop for a moment & consider the alternative or aftermath, in fact and/or in faith, to sincerely aspire to help another similar or unlikeable person somehow find themselves, or get to wherever they’re going a little bit easier, in order that you too might finally find yourself by osmosis or acquaintance, in a safer place on the planet & not so forlorn anymore.

Barry realized early in the book that he needed to define his residence as a place to commence from a point of familiarity, while at the start of his journey of self-discovery – ‘And if I had come to understand myself as a black American, and was understood as such, that understanding remained unanchored to place. What I needed was a community, I realized....’

Another favorite line he acknowledges; ‘I can see that my choices were never truly mine alone – and that that is how it should be, that to assert otherwise is to chase after a sorry sort of freedom.’

‘Hate is the culprit,’ he later surmises & so this obviously contemporary idiom could also be the sub-title for this or another book review, perhaps.

A favorite line from his Grandmother always reminded him to look for the good; ‘There’s a bright side somewhere...don’t rest till you find it.’

I wondered afterwards how he would help his extended family in Kenya, whether that constitutes more of a personal commitment rather than a national prerogative & thereby a slight hindrance certainly while he’s the President. Still, I want him to help his brother, Bernard & the other little guy named Godrey, to define their place & purpose in the world, as that certainly seems to quantify a measure of selfless community service, as well as a prerequisite to help a select few family members, but not to give them everything for free without a lesson of sorts inserted, in order for them to help themselves, first & foremost!

And be sure to read the Preface & the Introduction, to appreciate the overall effort, either before or after you read the main story of <500 pages; for example on page xvi – ‘...what has found its way onto these pages is a record of 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.’

When I recommend this book to my friends who are in search of something spiritually similar, I always remind them that it’s not about the color of his skin; for example, as I see him (and maybe that’s easier for me to say, than it would be for Barry to agree with this superficial summation from a white man), but I always only see him as tall & smart! And that’s what I like about Mr. Obama, something I think we both have in common, for sure & that’s a justifiable start for wanting to help another person reach their goal aka for the good of all concerned, certainly?! - Review by Jack Dunsmoor, author of the book, OK2BG

2 people found this helpful

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The Careful Observer

A Brilliant, Self-Written Account Of An Extraordinary Life.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 9, 2015

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A very normal, White American couple, by all accounts, typical midwesterners, start out in Kansas. The couple has an only child in a daughter, who, it seems from the start was rather unconventional. Eventually, the couple migrates to Hawaii. The daughter goes off to college and is entranced by a fellow African student, a brilliant man by the name of Barack Obama. The two fall in love at a time when interracial marriages were still outlawed in at least one American state. What is even more remarkable is that the parents of the young lady accept their new son-in-law, wishing the best for him and his new wife. The couple has a son and name him after the father. Though the son is technically “bi-racial,” the “one drop rule” of American society does not recognize that categorization, since any person with at least “one drop” of African blood in one's veins is ruled as Black. Interestingly, this child, the product of an African man and an American White woman, is by any true definition, genuinely African-American, a unique Black male in America who does not have slavery as a legacy in his genealogical heritage. When his father abandons his family, the young man struggles for his identity, combing great literature in search of who he is. He finds some comfort in the respect and intelligence of Malcolm X, but shies away from Malcolm's critique of his White ancestry. He goes to live with his mother in Indonesia, just one of the many symbolic cosmopolitan feathers that he will eventually have in his cap. His father haunts his dreams, and reappears for a brief period when he is age 10. He does ok, after a brief teenage experimentation with drugs, landing at a college in Los Angeles. Before he knows it, he can say that he has lived in the 3 largest cities in America, after transferring to a school in New York, and then moving onto Chicago. Everywhere he goes, he must wrestle with his unique racial ancestry, but somehow through it all, he reconciles his past to become an intelligent and strong personality, brimming with confidence. Unlike most memoirs of those who have been president, this is no “as told to” written account. Barack Obama is a very careful and brilliant crafter of words, this book written in a very sensitive and compelling lyrical style, almost as if he is telling it to you-and to you alone-across from him at a living room table. He is simply a great writer. This is an excellent book, on so many levels and is highly recommended. This book can be complemented by another, “Reality's Pen: Reflections On Family, History & Culture,” by Thomas D. Rush. Rush's book can be found right here on Amazon. In Rush's work, we get to see the “average Joe's” fascinating 1989 account of two very long conversations with what will eventually become the first African-American President in American History. It's good to get this account because it occurs long before Obama is famous, between two people just going about the daily business of their lives. What makes the interaction even more compelling is the fact that Obama innocently lays out an image of what he hopes to see occur within his romantic life, a romantic life prior to the time of his introduction to Michelle. It is oh so fascinating, and can be found in the piece on page 95 of Rush's work called, “You Never Know Who God Wants You To Meet.”

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Anna.

interessante

Reviewed in Italy 🇮🇹 on May 7, 2023

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buona lettura, che esplora la vita d'infanzia e adolescenza dell'ex presidente. Ricco di dettagli e anneddoti sul rapport conflittuale con il padre. Una lettura interessante.

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Alejandra Ahumada

Buen libro

Reviewed in Mexico 🇲🇽 on July 29, 2019

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Un poco sucio, llegó sin plástico de protección, pero nada del otro mundo

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JORGE A TORREAO DAU

Building an identity

Reviewed in Brazil 🇧🇷 on March 6, 2019

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It is easy to appear like someone with a ready made identity. But to search one by seeking ones origin and inheritance, and go beyond ready made categories to embrace change is not. That is what one can see on this inspiring book.

Trygve Rikkart Nilsen

Una historia muy interesante.

Reviewed in Spain 🇪🇸 on August 21, 2016

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Y también como él, con la infancia que tenia, pudra ser presidente de EEUU.
Hay cosas en el libro que me parece raro. Pero en total una historia muy interesante.

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Carlos Alduncin

Obama is the man

Reviewed in Mexico 🇲🇽 on June 26, 2019

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Excelente libro, muy recomendable

One person found this helpful

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Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance Hardcover – January 9, 2007

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Buy new:

$10.64

$3.99 delivery: Aug 4 - 7

Ships from: AnaCo

Sold by: AnaCo

Buy used:

$8.81