Obama’s quest for the meaning of his absent father’s life becomes a search for his own identity in Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. First published in 1995, beautifully written, it is the story of his youthful disaffection and salvation through community organizing in Chicago ... What comes across in his touching memoir is not how lost he was, but how determined on the path to elected office he already was when writing his first book. It is the work of someone positioning himself, someone who understood instinctively Malcolm X’s autobiography as a conversion narrative in the American grain.
A sharp eye and a generous heart distinguish this memoir ... Obama is anything but a solipsist; he is always looking beyond himself, at family, community, the wider world ... A polished writer, with a novelist’s skill in describing a place or a person and framing a scene. What his eye sees--often critically--his heart forgives: a compelling double vision ... So vividly does Obama portray other people, male and female, that his own story proceeds almost underground.
Dreams from My Father...recounts Obama's journey from happy, race-less boy running barefoot through the muddy back streets of Jakarta to perplexed adolescent and student in Honolulu, Los Angeles and New York, and to eager but ignorant and, eventually, reasonably productive community organiser on Chicago's South Side ... Obama's writing is characterised throughout by a graceful eloquence, a generosity of perception and spirit rare in young men of many gifts and charisma. He admits that most of the related conversations are approximations, his ear for which could be the envy of many a novelist, and this from someone whose primary writing was previously academic ... A testimony for the ages.
Dreams From My Father is a remarkable story, beautifully told, and inspired by its author's divided family history ... Consciously or not, Obama has placed his book in a literary tradition of political prose that goes back to another master of the American language: Abraham Lincoln ... It's a fair bet that this account of one man's search for meaning in his life as a black American will hardly do its author any harm.
Whether Mr. Obama has at last made peace with himself remains unclear, but he has at least stepped out of the paternal shadow ... At a young age and without much experience as a writer, Barack Obama has bravely tackled the complexities of his remarkable upbringing. But what would he have us learn? That people of mixed backgrounds must choose only one culture in which to make a spiritual home? That it is not possible to be both black and white, Old World and New? If this is indeed true, as Mr. Obama tells it, then the idea of America taking pride in itself as a nation derived of many different races seems strangely mocked. America will always be part of the Old World and part of the New, part dream and part reality -- that truth is integral to the greatness and the possibility from which Mr. Obama has so richly profited.
An honest, often poetic memoir about growing up biracial ... At its best, despite an occasional lack of analysis, this affecting study of self-definition perceptively reminds us that the dilemmas of race generally express themselves in terms of individual human struggles.
Elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama was offered a book contract, but the intellectual journey he planned to recount became instead this poignant, probing memoir of an unusual life ... Obama leaves some lingering questions--his mother is virtually absent--but still has written a resonant book.
