| Dreams from My Father |  | Author: Barack Obama
Publisher: Times Books
Category: Book
This item is no longer available
Avg. Customer Rating:  300 reviews
Sales Rank: 2960850
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
ISBN: 0812927710
EAN: 9780812927719
ASIN: 0812927710
Publication Date: March 1997
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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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 295 more reviews...
 Not that illuminating October 15, 2008
This is an odd book. I must say at the start that I intend to vote for McCain, but that I encouraged my wife (the Democrat in the family) to vote for Obama, because frankly among the Democrat candidates he's the one I thought the best of. Frankly, I have to say that this book, while well-written, didn't make me like him any better: if anything, it made me like him less.
As an aside, I should address one issue to start: the question of whether he actually wrote the book, or someone else did. One conservative blogger has been pushing the idea, based on "textual analysis", that Bill Ayers (the "old man" from Obama's neighborhood who helped found the Weathermen and used to blow stuff up) was the ghostwriter. I suppose that's possible, but the mere fact that Obama hadn't written anything prior to this isn't evidence. The argument is that someone as unpolished as Obama couldn't suddenly be this eloquent. In response to this, I would point out that Harper Lee and Margaret Mitchell each produced one book, along with William T. Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant. Grant, famously, was supposedly even on books: he wrote one (considered a classic by most) and he read one. Frankly I'd be surprised if anyone could prove Obama didn't write every word of this.
This is a memoir. Like most memoirs, the author reconstructs conversations, recreates scenes from his childhood that are murky or half-remembered, fills in the gaps of his life. This is Obama's childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood as Obama remembers it, and it's bound to be flawed at some points. The author acknowledges this after a fashion, and also says that he changed names and so forth to protect people's privacy. If the author wasn't the presidential candidate that he is now, these things wouldn't attract any attention at all. Since the author relies on his memory to inform his account of his own life, there will be occasions when others disagree or remember things differently. That's the nature of the beast.
All of the above being said, it's important to note the format and content of the book. The author spends considerable time at the beginning of the book outlining his mother's family and background. He then briefly outlines his parent's brief marriage, his birth, and his childhood, in Hawaii, Indonesia, and Hawaii again. He only briefly recounts his experience at the college he attended, Occidental here in Los Angeles. He then skips over several years of his life in New York City, where he must have accomplished something (at one point he mentions in an aside "my secretary" which implies some success in business, given that he hadn't reached thirty years old yet). While he's in New York City, his sister from Africa calls him to inform him that their father has died in a car accident. The author then recounts in some detail his change in career that took him to Chicago, where he became a community organizer. To hear Obama tell it, he went to Chicago because the organization he joined there was a good fit for him.
Finally, he quits the community organizer job, and goes to Africa to visit the African side of his family. This trip, which lasted several weeks, takes up the last third of the book. In it you learn a great deal about his father, and about the rest of the family, especially his forbears. While he says that the community organizing in Chicago was the event that changed his life, he clearly valued the visit to Kenya also.
The book is strange in a way memoirs often are. It's more informative about what the author thought of others around him than it is about the author himself. I suppose in some ways his view of others tells you something about himself, but frankly that's not the same thing. While Obama displays the same charming self-deprecating sense of humor that he uses on Jay Leno at some point, it comes off as a shield to protect what he's really thinking about things. At times, he makes it clear that he feels more connected to the African side of his family than to the American side.
The strange thing is the alienation that he feels, and expresses, in the course of the book. He recounts a relatively protected life, given that he grew up in 60s America, for the most part. He experienced, as far as the reader can tell, little of the racism that most other blacks endured, and challenged, during the Civil Rights era. Hawaii was, and is, a relatively unique state in our Union: whites are a distinct minority, and the rest of the population is a polyglot mix of every variety of Polynesians, Asians, and other races. There is no real dominant ethnic group, so everyone more or less fits in. Obama, of course, fit in reasonably well, and during the late sixties (the height of the Civil Rights era) Obama was in Indonesia with his mom and her new husband. When he graduated from the private school his grandparents got him into, he came here to California, and apparently again avoided any racial controversy. New York and Chicago followed, and while in New York City he had a white girlfriend but couldn't fit in with her rich family, he makes it clear that the problem, at least ostensibly, was his rather than the whites'. In Chicago, organizing the community, he of course met the institutional racism that you'd expect in a big city like Chicago in the 80s.
It's what he turns this into, however, that is the most revealing part of the book. He becomes outraged by the racism that others encountered; in some ways you get the idea that he's more upset than if he was the actual victim of it. While racism is a thing that should outrage everyone, Obama is rather unusual, since his immediate ancestors are both black and white. Instead of acting as some sort of bridge between the two communities, he just ignores his white roots, and becomes black, or African-American, or whatever. While he recounts his white antecedents to start the book, by the end he's clearly identifying with his African relatives by the end of it.
I will give the author credit for writing a good book. I will also give him credit for being, in some ways, relatively open about his feelings and reactions to others. The author, however, has an odd quality to him which the book doesn't really illuminate. He seems almost a mirror for anyone's attitudes or opinions. It's like he's a blank canvas, and those who wish to support him paint onto him their own views and beliefs, and somehow come to believe that he thinks these things. The difficulty with this, of course, is that he probably does have real beliefs and views, and those are obscured pretty thoroughly, even in a book like this.
I'm not certain, and I haven't read the later book, but I suspect this one is more illuminating, in spite of the opacity of the subject when he speaks of himself. The reason that I give for this is simple: this book was written back in the mid-90s, when Obama was a relatively unknown figure. If you'd told Hillary Clinton, back then, that she was going to run for President in 2008, and that she would be defeated by a black guy from Chicago whom no one had then heard of, she wouldn't have believed you. That makes this book, for whatever it's worth, a relatively good guidebook towards the man's character. Problem is, it doesn't tell as much as you'd expect.
Dreams from My Father October 14, 2008
Book was okay. Decent reading. However, I wanted to get more insight into Obama before election. Learned nothing. I expected clarification of his ideas/ideals.
 Too bad he won't admit that it was ghost written October 14, 2008
2 out of 9 found this review helpful
Who wrote this book? Most likely, NOT Obama. Textual analysis suggests that this book was either written or largely written by someone other than Obama. Now, there is nothing wrong with a politician using a ghost writer UNLESS he refuses to admit it and the book gives the impression that the politician is more eloquent, intelligent, and talented than he actually is. In that case, the book becomes a deception on the public. Check out this question on the internet. There is a good possibility that Obama did not write this and did not have the talent to write this. Who did? The answer may surprise you - AND bring down his candidacy.
 Poetic Introspection October 11, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This amazingly frank memoir bares the soul of a confused and deprived, then ambitious and determined, man of his times. The multi-racial, multi-cultural, migratory experience of Barack Obama both reflects and defines the post-modern secular society that the United States has become in the 21st century. This masterfully told tale transcends the senator's own life to illustrate the trials and pain of the racial divide that persist both here and abroad. It portrays the chronically sad consequences of tribal and colonial history for Africans, Europeans and Americans.
By turns troubling yet hopeful, morose yet humourous, depressing yet inspiring, this book probes your emotions and challenges your worldview. Obama weaves an incredible tapestry of characters, places and moods with language more befitting a poet than a politician. His look inside himself is as deep and penetrating as his thoughts about the human condition. Although not everyone will agree with his conclusions, no one can deny his convictions.
 Why can't we just call it shameless propaganda? October 10, 2008
10 out of 42 found this review helpful
This is typical shameless garbage that the criminal elite use to promote themselves and their underlings. And don't be ridiculous and think that slick BHO even wrote this book. None of our phoney, criminal, deviant, controlled "leaders" ever write any of the shameless books that are attributed to them. Why do we continue to be so naive and foolish? Why do we continue to think that we live in any sort of democracy?
What can be said for sure about BHO is that he is an attractive man who can spew forth what is written for him in an eloquent manner. Oh, and he has nice white teeth. That's it folks, and I could care less what Oprah and all those little Hollywood turds gush about him, because BHO is a manufactured cut-out of a candidate who will be completely controlled by all the usual suspects. But, don't think just anyone could do what BHO does. He has a small army of helpers creating his image, dressing him, booking teeth whitening appointments, and white washing his past - especially on the internet. He has obviously had quite a bit of training in public speaking, but not just the "normal" type that you and I might sign up for. No, no. What he's been well trained in (as was Clinton, Reagan, and many others) is neurolinguistic programming (NLP) and subtle hypnotic/subliminal speech patterns. Of course it also helps a great deal that everywhere he speaks is "specially wired" for sound, which affects the audience in ways they probably couldn't comprehend or believe. This type of frequency manipulation of brain waves and body rhythms has been perfected for well over 2 decades. But, that's getting off topic...
In regards to this book, ... *** news flash *** After having spent about 5 minutes writing the above, I pushed "publish review" to get the process started and went for about a 3 minute bathroom break and then returned to finish writing, and when I returned there was already 3 "not helpful" votes registered for this review in that very, very short time frame. And you say you don't believe that a small army of "trolls" patrol the internet trying to misdirect and neutralize on behalf of the criminal elite??!!
Anyways, the amount of misdirection, inconsistency, undocumented statements / claims, and total shameless introspective pyscho mish-mash in this book is gut wrenching (in a bad way). But for a sane person searching for the truth, here are some questions to ponder: where was his father born in reality? how many wives / offspring did he have? as a "poor goat farming" family, how did he get the expensive initial education that he did? what are the connections to the Ford Foundation and the Rockefellers? where was BHO's mother born and why is there no records for the first 10 years of her life? if she was schooled in Lebanon initially, why? why can't the BHO Team produce a birth certificate from the State of Hawaii if he was born there? why did the BHO Team finally release a "document of live birth" that was shown to be a forgery? where was BHO born then? why was BHO's "maternal grandfather" working for the Rockefellers? why is there essentially no evidence that BHO went to Columbia University and why does he refuse to release transcipts in order to prove it? what is the connection of Indonesia to BHO really? And these are just a few questions a great researcher by the name of Don Nicoloff brings up in his writings for the Idaho Observer.
Here's my personal take: BHO is part of an elite group of underlings with Rockefeller connections whom the real Controllers choose from to do their biddings. His real family tree has been obscured, as has his early childhood, and his "resume" has been grossly fluffed up to say the least, but these are common themes within the group of elite underlings. Two general statements that can be said about all elite underlings (and they apply to BHO of course) are they have connections - Rockefeller at least, but also Israel, and they have a variety of "hooks" in them. "Hooks" are things that create shame and fear and allow for blackmail, control, and sometimes extortion. All elite underlings have similar "hooks", and these are sexual deviance (homosexuality and usually pedophilia), hard core drug use, criminal financial activity, and (believe it or not) some sort of connection to Satanic / essoteric / occult rituals and rites. Now, having said that, BHO could have been chosen to be some CEO, or Senator, or Supreme Court Judge, or high level military man, or International banker, or Ambassador by the Controllers, but obviously it was decided (probably due to his skin color, good looks, and ability to master those special public speaking protocols) that he could take a run at the Presidency. Then among the Controllers, Brezinski obviously won the rights to be BHO's handler and direct him in agendas only the criminal elite can fathom. But, don't think that McCain doesn't have his connections, hooks, and handler also, because he has. This is the System that actually exists, but the sheeple dream of democracy and read books like this because they want to have hope, believe in ideals, and delay dealing with reality. In this sense, the book is brilliantly titled in an ironic, double meaning sort of way.
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