Item 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.
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).
Product Details
- Author: Barack Obama
- Publication Date: 2007-01-09
- Publisher: Crown
- Product Group: Book
- Manufacturer: Crown
- Binding: Hardcover, 464 pages
- Features:
- ISBN13: 9780307383419
- Condition: New
- Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
- Package Dimensions:
- Dimensions: 900L x 620W x 160H
- Weight: 165
- List Price: $25.95
- ISBN: 0307383415
- ASIN: 0307383415
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Customer Reviews
Average Amazon User Rating:
Fantastic couragous look at where we come from, foundation of where we can go
2010-09-05
Reviewer: Katie Larsen
Obama courageously tells of his tracing of his family history, sharing with us insights into race, Africa, family bonds across cultures. This book ranks for me with Mandela, Gandhi and Martin Luther King in its strong and honest look at one's self. Few share the facing of challenges with family, modern life, and coming to terms with contribution in such a profound and honest way.
Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
2010-08-23
Reviewer: Bama Betty
I foun this book to be an extremely open and honest literary memoir that fused thoughs, ideologies, philosophy and the absurdities of life in a format that flowed as a result of his literary style, one that is eloquently descriptive and touched this reader on a very deep level. This book has been a spiritual awakening of the providence of God. I believe the young Harvard Law Review President broke the glass ceiling in that exclusive domain in order to break the ultimate ceiling of an exclusive white male dominated society of U.S. Presidents. Personally, I could see throughout this writing, God's gentle guiding, I feel his selfless work as a Community Organizer in Chicago got him ready for the battles he would face as a Senator and on a larger scale as President of the U.S. I believe that like Dr. King, President Obama has also followed the teachings of Ghandi in not responding to naysayers and all the negative press. He is criticized by liberals who I believed supported him for his race rather than his intellect and found that his intellect was more than they bargained for and his race cannot be put in a neat package - he was sired by a pure blooded African and raised by a white mother and her white parents, only really meeting his father once at a young age, I believe 10, and his African relatives as an adult. I believe Barack H. Obama used his intellect and tenacity and brush with poverty to help turn around a nation facing more problems when he took office than any President since Lincoln. I thank God Barack Obama wrote eloquently and shared a himself with the world through the book I just read: Dreams From My Father. All of us dream, but people with purpose who are willing to work hard learn to differentiate dreams from reality. I think the writer, Barack Obama knew that journey is a quest that we spend the whole of our life sorting as we continue attempting to separate dreams from reality.
Obama an America Hating Communist.
2010-07-29
Reviewer: K. Ward
Nice book about how Obama came to deeply Hate America and follow the path to Communism and Failure.
WE NEED A LIBRARY COLLECTION!
2010-06-29
Reviewer: Lawrence F. Lihosit
Dear Mr. President:
As a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (Honduras, 1975-1977), I request your help to create a new Special Collection at the Library of Congress, the Peace Corps Experience Collection. This would include published memoirs, letters, essays, novels, short stories and poetry inspired by service. By creating such a repository, the Library of Congress would become a historical guardian for the Peace Corps' collective memory and promote understanding (the Peace Corps' third goal).
Currently, there is no such treasure. The Kennedy Library only accepts original material. Tragically, even the Peace Corps Resource Library in Washington D.C. does not keep published work written by its own volunteers, the salt of the earth. As the fiftieth anniversary of the Peace Corps' inception approaches, let us correct this.
As you know, hundreds of thousands of Americans have heard the call and hundreds have returned to fulfill that pledge to share their experience through literature. Since commercial publishers have historically shown little interest in Peace Corps Volunteer's literature, ninety percent of these books are self-published. The Library of Congress currently will not accept any book unless at least 500 copies were printed. In today's Print-On-Demand publishing world, this excludes almost all Peace Corps' books.
Popular government sponsored programs are rare. During the first half of the twentieth century only the W.P.A. and the C.C.C. caught America's imagination. During the second half of the twentieth century, only N.A.S.A. and the Peace Corps have been equally popular. Yet, like the W.P.A. and the C.C.C., first-hand experience books about the Peace Corps are hard to find and our collective memory fades.
The Library of Congress has a great set of special collections, several of which include twentieth century work. There is even a collection of "Amateur Publications" by early twentieth century journalists! The addition Peace Corps literature will serve our nation well at no cost to the tax payer. The books will be donated. Web sites related to the Peace Corps are numerous.
Most wise leaders are remembered for supporting the arts and learning. This is an opportunity for President Obama. The fiftieth anniversary is the perfect time to announce the creation of a Peace Corps Experience Collection within the Library of Congress. Thanking you in advance for your kind consideration,
Gift for my mother
2010-06-28
Reviewer: S. Bailey
My mother really enjoyed reading this book. She was born in the South during the depression. President Obama is her hero. It was a treat to read about his life.
