Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
by Barack Obama

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Book Reviews of Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

Book Review: Not a campaign booklet, but a frank personal insight
Summary: 5 Stars

Like most people outside Illinois, I had not heard of Barack Obama until he gave his speech at the Democratic Convention on 27 July (it can be read on his website: www.obamaforillinois.com), and I was fortunate to find the last copy of his book in a Chicago bookshop in August. The opening of the convention speech is a brief outline of the background that formed the book. His father was a Kenyan who went to study in Hawaii, and his mother was living in Hawaii having grown up in Kansas. They parted company soon after Barack was born.

The book is about his childhood and how he adapted to life after his father left his mother. She remarried an Indonesian man, and they went with him to live in Indonesia for some years. Barack returned to the US to finish high school. After graduating, he went to work in Chicago among underprivileged black communities there before deciding to go to law school in Harvard.

Obama's style of writing is extremely personal and analytical of how he dealt with certain issues in his life - his absent father, the colour of his skin, the remarriage of his mother, how he learnt of his father's death, his work in Chicago, his decision to become a lawyer and his rediscovery of his roots in Kenya (including his grandmother, uncles and aunts, and various half-brothers and sisters). Despite having led a very different life in a different part of the world, I was regularly struck by similarities between his life and mine - and can only assume that every reader would have the same reaction.

On a slightly critical note, the book is written at times in quite a fictionalised style that took some time to get used to. It cannot really be believed that Obama remembered every word and pause in quite so many conversation (not to mention what he saw through the window during the many pauses in conversation).

That aside, this is a great book which appears not to have been written with an eye on a political career (future Republican opponents will doubtless make great play out of a small, passing reference to drug use). It was first published in 1995 when Obama was fresh out of law school, commissioned as a result of his having been the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review. Even if his political star were to fade without the widely tipped shot at the 2012 presidency, I would recommend anybody to read his book.

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