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Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and…
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Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

by Barack Obama

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  1. 30
    The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream by Barack Obama (foof2you)
    foof2you: This is Obama's life story and how became the man he is today.
  2. 30
    The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (whitewavedarling)
    whitewavedarling: While these works may be in regard to entirely different cultures and nations, and one of fiction while the other is nonfiction, both are literary coming-of-age tales that are not only beautiful written, but relevant to today's issues and diversity, and memorable for their tales and messages.… (more)
  3. 20
    Renegade: The Making of a President by Richard Wolffe (Furu)
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English (142)  Norwegian (2)  Dutch (2)  French (2)  German (1)  Spanish (1)  All languages (150)
Showing 1-5 of 142 (next | show all)
Obama is not the greatest writer, and Three Rivers Press is definitely not the greatest editor. But the man has a remarkable (and candid) story to tell and an admirable outlook on life.

"'You must respect your elders. They clear the way for you so that your path is easier. But if you see them falling into a pit, then you must learn to what?'

'Step around,' said Bernard.

'You are right. Diverge from that path and make your own.'" ( )
  katemo | May 16, 2013 |
annoying & boring. Couldn't even finish it. ( )
  stacey2112 | Apr 22, 2013 |
This is about Barack Obama's struggle to find his own identity, sort of through learning more about the father he never got the chance to really know.

Non-fiction is not my thing. I usually find it very boring and dry. But this was well-written, and, while it didn't rivet my attention, I didn't really have to slog my way through it either.

As a white woman, I obviously can't relate to a black man's struggle to find his place in a world that is too often unwilling to give him a fair chance. But we've all had some sort of encounter like that. Maybe not on a daily basis, but we've all been unfairly judged. So there is something in that aspect for everyone to relate to.

I mostly picked this book up because I wanted to see what Obama was about (not that it matters; my state's primary isn't until May). I did feel like his book gave me some into who he is. It was interesting to watch him go from being a young man unwilling to do much more than "rage against the machine" to an organizer who tries to fix what is broken.

I would recommend this to people who are going through the same kind of struggle for identity that he went through, and also to people, like me, who just want to see what's behind the 30-second segments in the debates and commercials. ( )
  JG_IntrovertedReader | Apr 3, 2013 |
So far, quite interesting. Giving me a look at our President's background that I shamefully was ignorant of :/
Fav. Quote so far: "“Sometimes you can’t worry about hurt. Sometimes you worry
only about getting where you have to go.”
  laurelei | Mar 31, 2013 |
Wow, I did not expect to be as moved or riveted by this book as I was. And so proud to have a president who actually thinks about these things. I only wish I had read it when I first moved to Chicago. But maybe before I taught in Roseland and lived in Hyde Park, it wouldn't have resonated nearly as much. ( )
  annemlanderson | Mar 31, 2013 |
Showing 1-5 of 142 (next | show all)
All men live in the shadow of their fathers -- the more distant the father, the deeper the shadow. Barack Obama describes his confrontation with this shadow in his provocative autobiography, "Dreams From My Father," and he also persuasively describes the phenomenon of belonging to two different worlds, and thus belonging to neither.
 
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Epigraph
"For we are strangers before them, and sojourners, as were all our fathers. I Chronicles 29:15.
Dedication
First words
A few months after my twenty-first birthday, a stranger called to give me the news.
Quotations
They are NOT my people.

(No quotation marks.)

Pg. 47

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(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
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Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0307383415, Hardcover)

Nine years before the Senate campaign that made him one of the most influential and compelling voices in American politics, 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 the people 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, and will play, an increasingly prominent role in healing a fractious and fragmented nation.



Pictured in lefthand photograph on cover: Habiba Akumu Hussein and Barack Obama, Sr. (President Obama's paternal grandmother and his father as a young boy). Pictured in righthand photograph on cover: Stanley Dunham and Ann Dunham (President Obama's maternal grandfather and his mother as a young girl).

(retrieved from Amazon Thu, 25 Nov 2010 00:45:09 -0500)

(see all 4 descriptions)

The son of an African father and white American mother discusses his childhood in Hawaii, his struggle to find his identity as an African American, and his life accomplishments.

» see all 8 descriptions

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Audible.com

Two editions of this book were published by Audible.com.

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Canongate Books

Four editions of this book were published by Canongate Books.

Editions: 1847670911, 1847670946, 1847674380, 1847673287

Penguin Australia

Two editions of this book were published by Penguin Australia.

Editions: 1921351438, 1921520620

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