Barack Obama: “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance”

President Barack ObamaI first read Barack Obama’s fascinating memoir, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance when he was still a U.S. Senator, not yet launched on his bid to become President of the United States.

I was drawn to the memoir for three reasons: I love memoirs, especially family memoirs; I was in the process of writing a memoir about my own absent father and his family; and I had been impressed by Obama’s stirring speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. This was a man who intrigued me, and I wanted to see what his memoir would reveal.

For better or worse (and I think it’s better), Obama is candid in his memoir, written in 1996. He writes about his struggle to understand his father’s absence. He writes about his flirtation with Marxist theory and structural feminism. He writes about his drug and alcohol use. I love that Obama tells the truth in his memoir, but not surprisingly his words (often taken out of context) have been used against him by his opponents.

The actual memoir itself, taken in total, is a compelling, exquisitely written tale. If you haven’t yet read this memoir, I highly recommend it.

It’s thoughtful and honest, baring the soul of the mixed race boy and young man:

The emotions between the races could never be pure; even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves. Whether we sought out our demons or salvation, the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart.

It’s educational, explaining as it does what it means to be a “community organizer” (a term and profession for which Obama has taken a lot of heat):

The boarded-up homes, the decaying storefronts, the aging church rolls, kids from unknown families who swaggered down the streets – loud congregations of teenage boys, teenage girls feeding potato chips to crying toddlers, the discarded wrappers tumbling down the block – all of it whispered painful truths.

And perhaps most importantly to my writer’s sensibility, it’s beautifully written, containing such passages as this description of Chicago:

Winter came and the city [Chicago] turned monochrome – black trees against gray sky above white earth. Night now fell in midafternoon, especially when the snowstorms rolled in, boundless prairie storms that set the sky close to the ground, the city lights reflected against the clouds.

Ready to read the book? Start by reading Obama’s preface to the 2004 edition of the book or this short passage about a market in Chicago. Then follow that up with reading the entire book itself. If you’d like to hear Obama read the book to you, check out the abridged audio version.

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Listen:

Listen to President Obama reading from Dreams from My Father in this 6-minute clip. When you get to this Random House page, click on “Listen to an excerpt.”

Photo credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Barack-Obama-portrait-PD.jpeg