Very interesting reading.

books:


	• Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance Barack Obama Crown, 2007 - 464 pages average customer review:based on 267 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Obama shines!

A noble, dignified man, a great politician and a terrific writer! I did not want to put this book down. A wonderful insight into the makings of this man of refreshing character. Obama's story brings laughter, tears and wonder; it bridges ages, genders, races and creeds; it draws up memories of our own coming of age. I cannot wait to start on his second book!

Very interesting reading.

Interesting perspective. I enjoyed reading this book while on vacation this summer. It gave me a lot of insight into what kind of person Barack Obama is and where he came from. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in learning about the man who will be our next president of the United States.

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But who is HE?

Very objective, almost arm's length narrative. While one wonders how any child can come through such a childhood unscathed, I missed his own emotional responses to the people and events in his life. In particular, I would have welcomed a sense of his mother's personality. While one got a reasonably good image of his maternal grandparents, the mother remained an enigma.
I read the book in the hope of learning more about Obama, the person, but came away with more questions than answers.

Great Book

This is the book that introduced me to Barack Obama and made me a fan. You will understand Obama by reading this book and why his American experience is closer to today's America than other Presidential candidates.

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Disappointing

In terms of insight to the man, it is a rather disappointing memoir. Not to take anything away from him though, as he does appear to be the real deal in US politics, since JFK.

I expected the book to be a revelation as to how he developed his character and ideas. To understand the circumstances that had forged his personality. And I was let down. As it turns out the book is merely an account of his life-journey just before getting into Harvard. In the end, you get to see that his is an ordinary life, except maybe for the fact that he has an 'international' family background. Even that, does not explain the makings of the man.

So, if you're looking to understand what made Barack Obama into the phenom that he is today, this is not the book my friends.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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.

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