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Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance | 
| Author: Barack Obama
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
Buy New: $8.97
You Save: $5.98 (40%)
Rating:  380 reviews
Sales Rank: 28
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 480
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8 x 4.5 x 0.8
ISBN: 1400082773
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.04960730092
EAN: 9781400082773
Publication Date: August 10, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Product Description
In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father—a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man—has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey—first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 375 more reviews...
 Inspiring Life Story...Somewhat Less Than Complete August 31, 2004
307 out of 344 found this review helpful
U.S. Senate hopeful Barack Obama has an inspiring story to share, and yet he doesn't simply rest on his laurels in this critical evaluation of his life and in his continuing search for himself as a black American. He wrote "Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance" almost ten years ago, but his stock has obviously surged since his star-making speech at the Democratic National Convention last month, perhaps to the chagrin of Hillary Clinton...unless she is dreaming of a Clinton-Obama ticket in 2008! Growing up mulatto in Hawaii and Indonesia, Obama discusses trying to come to grips with his racial identity through a period of rebellion that included drug use, becoming a community activist in Chicago and traveling to Kenya to understand his father's past. It is in Kenya where he discovers a nation with forty different tribes, each of them saddled with stereotypes of the others. It is also in Kenya where he recognizes the dichotomy that has been his lifelong existence between the graves of his father and his grandfather. His description of this defining moment is worthy of a passage in Alex Haley's "Roots".
Obama is also candid about racism, poverty and corruption in Chicago, and he pulls no punches in his account of this period. Because the book stops in 1995, it does not get into much detail on his learning experiences, culminating in both missteps and triumphs, as a state legislator. For all the value the book provides on Obama's history, I would have appreciated a more substantive update than the preface on the last decade, as he gained political prominence in Illinois, so that we understand more why his time in the spotlight has come at this moment. Perhaps that will be Volume 2. I was also disappointed he spent so little time writing about his mother and the influence her side of the family has had on him, a narrative gap Obama acknowledges and over which he expresses regret in the preface. Perhaps inclusion of such details would have made for a less compelling story from his originally intended Afro-centric perspective; but at the same time, I think a more balanced look at his own racial dichotomy would have made his story resonate all the more given where he is now.
Obama is open in the preface about using changed names and composite characters to expedite the flow and ensure privacy of those around him, but it does somewhat lessen the impact of his story when one starts to wonder who was real and who was a fictionalized character. Regardless of these literary devices, this book is still a very worthwhile look into the background of someone who is on a major upward trajectory in the current national political scene.
 Eloquent, Insightful, Inspiring -- Just Like The Man July 28, 2004
256 out of 353 found this review helpful
I've had the privilege to meet Barack Obama, and to read 'Dreams From My Father' several years ago. For those who have just discovered Barack after his convention keynote speech, what you saw was only the tip of the iceberg. This is an immmensely talented, complex, intelligent and inspiring man on so many levels. As eloquent as his speech was, his book is equally so, and offers insights into how, as he put it, 'the skinny boy with the funny name' has evolved. I can only hope there will be many more books from Barack, who promises to be one of the most exciting politicians of the 21st century.
 What about Mom? April 17, 2007
216 out of 274 found this review helpful
Barack Obama is obviously an articulate, intelligent man; but his "story of race and inheritance" may leave readers scratching their heads at times. The story of his life, the son of a Kenyan man and a white woman who divorced when he was a young child, is atypical. His father, an extremely book smart man, polygamist, big talker and eventually sometimes embarrassment to the family who was known as the Old Man to his many children, seems an unlikely source of the "dreams" of which the title speaks. The author met his father but once, when he was ten years old. Dr. Barack Obama was already married (p 422) when he met his namesake's mother while studying in the States. He returned to Africa alone, married again (and again) and had more children. His mother then married (and later divorced) an Indonesian man and they moved to Djakarta, where he spent his early years until moving in with his maternal grandparents in Hawaii. He ended up in Chicago, where he signed on to help organize African-Americans to work together to gain funding for projects to improve the quality of their lives and those of their children. Three years and much success (after a bumpy start) later, he headed off to graduate school, but not before finally attending services at a large, popular, local church. Readers may wonder if, during the several page section rounding out Part 2 (Chicago), he may have experienced some sort of spiritual awakening: the signs pointing ambiguously to "maybe," making one wonder why the event was included at all. The latter thirty percent of the book covers his first trip to Kenya (his father having already passed away) and his interactions with a convoluted web of relatives: aunts, uncles, cousins, and half and step siblings: the details of which, although unusual, will probably be of no more interest to readers than the tales of their own genealogical connections (a family tree would have been clarifying). Although Dreams From My Father is a good story about a smart, well-intentioned, accomplished man (with complicated family connections) who has lived an interesting life, its hard not to question his focus on his (absent) father in lieu of his mother.
 Okay... October 11, 2004
127 out of 181 found this review helpful
I swallowed this book for the first ten pages. It was intriguing, conversational, and I was excited to read about the man I voted for. I was into this book all the way up until he went to Africa. After he went to visit his family, there were just too many names and characters involved and I went from being confused to not caring at all. The author would tell me things like someone sipped a cup of tea. In a fiction story, that matters--in a nonfiction story, it's irrelevant. Many of the things Barack encountered while in Africa were unnecessary to tell me in this book although they may have been imperative to him. Every once in awhile, I'd hear a good story from his grandmother, I liked to hear about his father and grandfather growing up, but all the cousins/midwives/brothers/sisters etc. were a bore to read about.
 Shameless Self Promotion by a Modern Black Racist April 4, 2008
111 out of 254 found this review helpful
B.H.O. wrote this book knowing full well that his primary goal in life was to serve as president of the USA. Fortunately today we can read today this book from his earlier years and see precisely why he is not qualified to be president. This book demonstrates in conclusive fashion why he was and is so attracted to the likes of Jeremiah Wright, Louis Farakhan, and his angry wife. He is a brilliant orator, an average writer, and a poor thinker with little originality. So, like most political auto-biographies, save your money and buy it used if you must read it at all.
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