Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Barack Obama, Text Publishing, $29.99.
Former US President Barack Obama wrote Dreams From My Father in his early 30s — when he was just a few years out of law school and not yet a politician.
Originally published in 1995, it was hailed as ‘quite extraordinary’. In this edition, adapted for young adults, Obama writes in the new introduction: “The young man you meet in these pages is flawed and full of yearning, asking questions of himself and the world around him, learning as he goes. I know now, of course, that this was just the beginning for him. If you’re lucky, life provides you with a good long arc. I hope that my story will encourage you to think about telling your story, and to value the stories of others around you. The journey is always worth taking. Your answers will come.”
Barack Obama was the 44th president of the United States and the recipient of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.
Before he became a politician he was, among other things, a writer. Dreams From My Father is his masterpiece: a stimulating, illuminating portrait of a young man asking the big questions about identity and belonging.
The son of a black African father and a white American mother, Obama recounts an emotional odyssey as we connect with his challenges of high school and college, living in New York, becoming a community organiser in Chicago and travelling to Kenya. Through these experiences, he forms an enduring commitment to leadership and justice. Told through the lens of his relationships with his family — the mother and grandparents who raised him, the father he knows more as a myth than as a man, and the extended family in Kenya he meets for the first time — Obama confronts the complicated truth of his father’s life and legacy and comes to embrace his divided heritage.
He also had a deeper set of unresolved questions, ones that compelled him to start writing this book. He has strongly believed that the best way to meet the future involved making an earnest attempt at understanding the past. Some may see history as something we put behind us, a bunch of words and dates carved in stone, a set of dusty artifacts best stored in a vault. “But for me, history is alive the same way an old growth forest is alive, deep and rich, rooted and branching off in unexpected directions, full of shadows and light.”
This compelling memoir proves how powerful writing can be. It’s a chance to be inquisitive with yourself, to observe the world, confront your limits, walk in the shoes of others and try on new ideas.
