Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
Book Review: The very first 21st century voice for historical change
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is not a memoir or even Memoirs. It is a novel, a non-fictional true novel because life is a novel and even at times poetry, and Barack Obama is an absolutely perfect writer who captures the living texture of this life with gusto, taste and style. The book of course is a chase and search for the author's father by the author himself as far as far can be, including in the green hills of Africa. But it is also a lot more. It is the discovery of family roots growing in two different soils, continents or even universes. But Barack Obama is not psychotic nor schizophrenic, so he tells us the story of how he brought unity to himself without in any way negating the dual carriage way of his personality. He shows and even demonstrates how one cannot be anything in life if one does not build that personal unity from the patchwork of their lives. Some of his brothers, or sisters, or parents succeed with various methods. Some others fail or at least linger in unsuccessful attempts. Now, that is only the first element of the book that makes it an autobiography of sort. It is though and yet a lot more and I am going to give only a few examples. I like his "Home Squared" or even Home Power Three or Home Tripled, or whatever. I will insist on the power element because this approach of home gives power to the subject. This power comes from the ability of the subject to join the immediate home environment in which he or she lives to the original family home from which he or she comes, that is to say the parents' home that is in Obama's case double since he knew his father at first as coming from Kenya seen as his home and he discovers that he came from what this father called his Home Squared, that is to say the home base of his father's father. Obama's conception of a human being seems to be such a piled up pyramid made of many tiers, strata, layers, one on top of the other in the present, one deeper than the other into the past, and what about the future that gets its inspiration from this heap of potentials and possible realizations of one's dreams. This leads to a remark on authenticity that cannot be attached to one personal parameter connected to the outside world, including African-ness. Authenticity is attached to the contradictory unified patchwork that makes us what we are inside. I think Obama could easily reach beyond and add "at any discrete moment of one's life", no two moments even in close temporal succession being ever the same. We are ever changing and yet always the same, because we are what we see or even dream ourselves. The last point I will make is about his dynamic vision of the law. He knows the law can be seen as reflecting narrow-minded interests and greed. But he also knows that the law is a human creation that comes from the conversation between and among various individuals and circumstances reflecting the complex conflictive context of humanity at any moment in its history, a conversation that is aiming at creating balance and equilibrium even if in many cases it is biased and severely one-sided. But his phrase "a nation arguing with its conscience" is beautiful and worth sitting in any sacred corpus of canonical texts, including Goethe's Faust Second Part. It is, and should always be, a canon of American culture because we hold such truths to be self evident.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
Book Review: Barack Obama for President Please!
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a truly remarkable book. And I deeply hope that this thoughtful man becomes the president.
This book, which is not ghosted, was written when he was 33 years old long before he had any thoughts of a political career. In it he explores what is means to have a black Afrcan father that he never knew and a whilte American mother and seemingly to belong no-where. As he grows up he has to discover what it means to be black while being raised by white parents and, while doing so gives the reader a gentle and loving education into the issues of race.
As a white 'middle class' girl these are not issues that I have ever had to consider. It's easy for me to say 'I don't see colour, I only see people' as I have never had to see colour, I have never been reminded of my colour or had assumptions made about me based upon it.
But the book isn't just about colour - it's also about our inheritance, whatever that may be, it's about our personal history and having a sense of it, about understanding our parents and being able to forgive them because of that understanding. And about embracing and celebrating our inheritance.
It is a deeply moving book and I found myself crying in it more than once despite the fact that it is not written in a way that manipulates emotion. I would give this book ten stars even if it were written by an unknown author who never wrote another word. The fact that it is written by a man who may be president, is purely an added pleasure.
If a truly great book is one that alters us in some way and enables us to see the world around us differently - then this book succeeds on every level.