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.
Pictured in lefthand photograph on cover: Habiba Akumu Hussein and
Barack Obama, Sr. (President Obama's paternal grandmother and his
father as a young boy). Pictured in righthand photograph on cover:
Stanley Dunham and Ann Dunham (President Obama's maternal
grandfather and his mother as a young girl).
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