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Books : Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance |
List Price: $25.95Amazon.com's Price: $17.13 You Save: $8.82 (34%)Prices subject to change.
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.04960730092
EAN: 9780307383419
ISBN: 0307383415
Label: Crown
Manufacturer: Crown
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 464
Publication Date: January 09, 2007
Publisher: Crown
Release Date: January 09, 2007
Studio: Crown
Sales Rank: 1508
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
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.
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
I finally finished Dreams From My Father last night. And while I confess I rarely leave reviews. I realized this morning how important these reviews are at helping me make decisions to buy a book or not... With that being said, I must whole-heartedly recommend this book. If you are at all interested in the nature and character of our 44th President - it is a must read!
I AM AN OBAMA FAN! I fully acknowledge that, but I think this book will even help the skeptics among us. By all indications ... Read More
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I decided to read this book to find more about the man the world has enthusiatically endorsed as its new leader. That may seem funny to US citizens but in a survey in Australia over 70 percent of people said they supported Senator Obama . With all its power and influence the US calls the shots certainly it does in Australia . When reading the book I thought at time Obama was concentrating on the US Black / White issue as he said he might in the introduction. But thinking more I believe the book is more about ... Read More
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A very candid and revealing look at the background and genesis of our new president. The pain (and painful honesty) of Barack Obama's life growing up in Indonesia and Hawaii are offset by his personal and astute observations of the racial terrain in America. As someone in both black and white worlds, he has a rare viewpoint of the ways of these two conflicting cultures.
This is an engaging memoir of confronting the past in the process of self-discovery, of growing up "fatherless" in a single parent ... Read More
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The item was received in a very short time; pleased with the condition it arrived in.
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Well, guess what? Barack Obama, our soon-to-be president, is human. In this beautiful autobiographical memoir, the author reveals himself in all his inner complexity, confusion, struggles, failures and successes. He recounts moving stories of his childhood; the one month he spent with his late father, at age ten; his confusion about his own identity; his ups and downs as a student, his Indonesian stepfather; his years as a community organizer in a decaying Chicago neighborhood; his pilgrimage to Kenya and meetings ... Read More
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