Dreams From My Father
A Story of Race and Inheritance
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4.5 • 31 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Before Barack Obama became a politician he was, among other things, a writer. Dreams From My Father is his masterpiece: a refreshing, revealing portrait of a young man asking the big questions about identity and belonging.
The son of a black African father and a white American mother, Obama recounts an emotional odyssey. He retraces the migration of his mother's family from Kansas to Hawaii, then to his childhood home in Indonesia. Finally he travels to Kenya, where he confronts the bitter truth of his father's life and at last reconciles his divided inheritance.
'Dreams From My Father is a remarkable story…a journey of heart and mind into a family maelstrom of identity, class and race… in a literary tradition of political prose that goes back to another master of the American language: Abraham Lincoln.' Robert McCrum, Guardian
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama was offered a book contract, but the intellectual journey he planned to recount became instead this poignant, probing memoir of an unusual life. Born in 1961 to a white American woman and a black Kenyan student, Obama was reared in Hawaii by his mother and her parents, his father having left for further study and a return home to Africa. So Obama's not-unhappy youth is nevertheless a lonely voyage to racial identity, tensions in school, struggling with black literature--with one month-long visit when he was 10 from his commanding father. After college, Obama became a community organizer in Chicago. He slowly found place and purpose among folks of similar hue but different memory, winning enough small victories to commit himself to the work--he's now a civil rights lawyer there. Before going to law school, he finally visited Kenya; with his father dead, he still confronted obligation and loss, and found wellsprings of love and attachment. Obama leaves some lingering questions--his mother is virtually absent--but still has written a resonant book. Photos not seen by PW. Author tour.
