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: Very timely book!
Summary: 5 Stars
This is an extremely timely book for anyone who wants to know Barack Obama--who he is, where he came from, the forces that shaped him--all the things the Smear Machine doesn't want you to know at this time. Very readable & intriguing. Wonderfully well-written. Basically tells his life story from birth to the Illinois Senate race. Tells you where his head, heart, and passions lie. Book Review: "I had no idea who my own self was."
Summary: 5 Stars
This coming-of-age story is masterly. Barack Hussein Obama controls his narrative and thereby presents the self he wants the rest of us to use as our personal point of departure for describing and judging him.
DREAMS FROM MY FATHER has been well and frequently reviewed. I shall simply add a thought or two derived from watching the Illinois Senator's autobiographies extend themselves into his 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention and into the 2007 and 2008 Presidential campaigns. What insights into his race-consciousness, religion and patriotism emerge from comparing the text of DREAMS FROM MY FATHER with more recent events?
Senator Obama's father, Barack Obama, Senior, had called himself "Barry" when he came from Kenya to study in Hawaii. There he married Ann Dunham. With her parents Miss Dunham had moved there in 1959. Barry Junior, as he was taught to call himself, presents his white Kansas-reared mother and grandparents as, respectively, utterly detached from all structured religion or having once been lightly brushed by mainstream Protestant Christianity. The author speaks of himself from earliest years as notably introspective, detached from any passionate entanglements and severely analytical. Grandparents and mother raised him for all but four of his growing years, spent in Indonesia with his second, nominally Muslim, father figure, in this case his mother's second husband.
OBAMA AND RACE
Although genetically 1/2 American white and 1/2 Kenyan black, young Barry Obama (or "Bar" to the American grandfather who helped rear him) early chose to think himself as an American black. At his own request he stayed behind in Hawaii with his grandparents to complete his secondary schooling when his mother and half-sister returned without him to Indonesia. He grew up in a Hawaii accepting of races and mixed races. Only later did young Barry grasp that "I was supposed to have a live-in father" or "know that I needed a race" (p. 27) Later his mother taught Barry to be proud of his divorced father and his black lineage (51). A picture in LIFE magazine of a black man so ashamed of his color that he tried to peel off his skin made the youngster feel ambushed. A hidden horrible insight flashed upon him: personal enemies, racial bigots, were "out there" and "could reach me without anyone's knowledge, even my own" (51). Slowly, the boy decided that he must remain behind in Hawaii with white grandparents and raise himself "to be "a black man in America. (76)
OBAMA AND RELIGION
After college, Barack Obama did social organizing within a group of black churches in South Chicago. His upbringing had been un-religious, though his anthropologist mother was "spiritual." Being black in South Chicago opened doors all by itself: "my color had always been a sufficient criterion for community membership, enough of a cross to bear" (178).
If they were meeting him for the first time via telephone, some pastors were suspicious that he was a white Irishman named O'Bama (279). One day old Reverend Philips suggested that an obviously discouraged Obama's political goals for 50-odd black churches were failing for pulling black pastors away from "some of our more priestly concerns in favor of prophecy"(274). Those pastors might trust Barack more if they were sure that he was a man of faith, a member of a church -- any church.
And Rev. Philips and other black ministers converged in suggesting that Barack get to know Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Jr., pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ. Over a fair number of pages (274,280-287, 291-295)the author sketches Reverend Wright and his initial impact on the young black-conscious social worker.
In his follow-on book, THE AUDACITY OF HOPE (titled for a Wright sermon), Barack Obama briefly describes his conversion and baptism at Trinity United Church of Christ. He was now a Christian, having had no religion before. From his own words it seems that the only kind of Christian he would agree to be was a Black American Christian.
OBAMA AND PATRIOTISM
Patriotism is not a heavy theme in DREAMS FROM MY FATHER. Racism colors all aspects, Obama says, of multi-racial America. It is not easy to be black in America. When Junior was growing up, Obama Senior was back in Kenya, at times seeming about to carve a very prominent place for himself in national politics. But his inflexible adherence to principle lost him the patronage of President Jomo Kenyatta. Still, with input from his mother, young Barack phantasized about his father's greatness and came to the conclusion that, only if he could penetrate his dark, non-American father, could he ever understand himself. And to understand himself was at all times the driving crusade in the life of Barack Hussein Obama. "I had no idea who my real self was"(82).
A man I know suggested that all that is genetically American in the Senator is white, along with the vast bulk of his nurture. My acquaintance also opined that in turning his face away from his genetic and nurtured whiteness, Obama also deliberately turned his back on everything about him that came from America. He thought that this turning away from whiteness might perhaps explain some of the senator's apparent hang-up about wearing an American flag lapel pin -- an expression of solidarity to most Americans.
CONCLUSION: DREAMS FROM MY FATHER is a superior book from a superior communicator. The current junior senator from Illinois comes across as self-absorbed and self-conscious from his earliest years. But that sense of cool superiority to others which some think he now projects was, in this book, no more than an unusually developed sense of detachment, far from a studied aloofness which some now profess to find in the Presidential candidate. -OOO-
Book Review: The True Measure of the Man
Summary: 5 Stars
This book demonstrates in compelling fashion not just the intellectual brillance of the man, but the depth of his character. He is truly unique. After reading this book, one cannot help but become a fervant supporter. Book Review: A truly stunning autobiography
Summary: 5 Stars
I finished reading "Dreams From My Father" several days ago, but I am STILL trying to fully figure it out. I had really high expectations to begin with, from the several recommendations from friends, but I was really surprised by how honest and lyrical and well-written it was. I can only say that Barack Obama had NO clue he would ever be running for office when he wrote it.
It's an incredibly unsentimental book, but it's partly a love letter to his family. It begins with a romanticized view of the 30's, 40's and 50's, the small town America where his grandparents were raised in and that his mother was born into. Eventually, his grandparents, and his mother would move to Hawaii where young Stanley Ann would meet Barack Obama Sr., a charming student from Kenya; he would leave them when Barack was just two.
His father ends up being a tremendous disappointment to him, in the end but it is the absence and longing for him that forms the larger narrative of this book. Barack describes being disaffected and trying to figure out what it means to be African-American, despite having very few African-Americans in his life. Part of this journey is drug use and drinking (this is the part that he would probably have left out if he knew he would become a politician!), but eventually it would lead him to the very place he is at now: the desire to "bring change". He goes on to become a community organizer in the South Side of Chicago, for three formative years and, in the climax of the book, he visits Kenya for the first time, to become acquainted with the other half of his family and learn the true story of his father.
There's tons more to love about "Dreams", because he has such an interesting life. There is a fascinating account of his life as a child in Indonesia, where he lived for four years. There is his mother, Stanley Ann, who isn't a central figure the way his father was, but whose character and values are so much reflected in the person that Barack is today. And, of course, as the title suggests, this book is a meditation on race from the unique perspective of someone who belongs in both worlds.
Dreams was a joy to read and I highly recommend it, but more as a work of great literary worth. In other words, this isn't really the book you would read if you are trying to decide whether to vote for Barack Obama. That book is more "The Audacity of Hope" which is ALSO a wonderful book, and focuses mostly on his view of politics and policy and the actual "changes" that he wants to bring about. "Dreams" is more like a really, really honest look at Barack Obama, the man, rather than the politician or the candidate.
Of course, the man that emerges in this book is compassionate, and thoughtful, and wise, and self-aware and incredibly smart. And those are all the things we want in a president too.
Book Review: Dreams of my father by Barack Obama
Summary: 3 Stars
Dreams of my father by Barack Obama
The right to vote is to be taken seriously and the election process of 2008 is and remains difficult for most of us. For me, basic questions are:
1. What qualities do I look for in a person to lead the United States?
2. Where do the people running for office come from?
3. When did these candidates do something memorable that would inspire my vote?
4. Why would I vote for any of the candidates running for office?
5. Who are the candidates?
6. How do these candidates plan to lead during the next four or eight years?
Hillary Clinton is a known quantity. We have seen her in action for eight years while she was in the White House. John McCain is another person that we are familiar with, but to answer these basic questions about Barack Obama, I decided to read two of his books: "Dreams from my father, a story of race and inheritance" and "The Audacity of Hope."
Through Dreams of my father we are introduced to a man raised by his mother, a white woman from Kansas who married a young African man from Kenya. The marriage takes place while they lived in Hawaii.
Barack Obama surfaces as a person who struggles to understand the separate worlds that shaped his personality and in a search for identity he travels to Chicago and gets a job working as a community organizer. His full journey to discovery is completed when he travels to Kenya where he meets his African relatives, including his brothers and sisters, and becomes aware of the truth about his father's life.
Chapter 14 was interesting because it shares the inspiration for the title of his book `The Audacity of Hope.' The phrase comes from a "sermon given by Reverend Wright who read a passage from the Book of Samuel, the story of Hannah, who, barren and taunted by her rivals had wept and shaken in prayer before her God and how the story inspires a memory of a painting titled Hope, depicting a harpist who has undergone much and yet still has the desire to share notes with the one string left intact on her instrument... she dares to hope, she has the audacity to make music and praise God."
Does the book reveal qualities befitting the next leader of the USA? Has he done something memorable and worthy? Does his past provide the courage to lead those that are different and have not lived his experiences? Will Obama be able to lead our nation through these troubled times? In all fairness, read the books and make your own judgment, let's hope we do what is right for our future as a democratic nation.
The book was rather tedious to read and frankly, you can speed read through many of the passages, but it revealed where Barack Obama comes from and how his character is shaped.