Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama

Barack Obama is the child of a marriage between a white woman and a black man. One of the things that intrigued me about the 2008 U.S. presidential contest was the way Obama nullified the issue of race. Whenever asked about race or ethnicity, he reached for the U.S. motto, E Pluribus Unum - "from the many, one". It takes all kinds of people to make the U.S. what it is, and being united as "one" is really the most important thing.

Rewind the clock to 1990. Barack Obama has been elected the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review. This distinction was enough for Crown Publishing, a division of Random House, to offer him a publishing deal.

Obama originally intended to write a book about race relations in the United States; however, he ended up writing Dreams from My Father. Obama says:

When I actually sat down and began to write, though, I found my mind pulled towards rockier shores. First longings leapt up to brush my heart. Distant voices appeared, and ebbed, and then appeared again. I remembered the stories that my mother and her parents told me as a child, the stories of a family trying to explain itself … Compared to this flood of memories, all my well-ordered theories seemed insubstantial and premature.

What he produced is a personal, rather than theoretical, account: an “interior journey—a boy’s search for his father, and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American.” The book then is primarily about Obama's relationship with an absent father (whose place is filled in various ways by other elder males), and his search for a black identity (having been raised in a white household).

Obama's writing style is very good. He balances narrative and argument is pleasing proportions. His descriptions of people, places and situations are lean but acute, and his ability to analyse and explain social and political issues is top-notch.

Dreams from My Father is an incredibly honest account, and all the more so because it was written by Obama well before he became a politician. Worth reading