Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
Author: Obama, Barack |
| | ISBN | : | 9781847673510 | | Format | : | Paperback | | Publisher | : | Canongate Books | | Publish Date | : | 21-AUG-2008 | | Main Category | : | HUMANITIES | | Sub Category | : | POLITICS/WAR | | Price | : | RM 39.90* | | Usual Local Delivery | : | 3 to 5 business days |
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* price may change from time to time as advised by the publishers |
Years before becoming the 44th President-elect of the United States,
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
thepeople 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 the most prominent role in healing a
fractious and fragmented nation.
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