Review - Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama

From www.goodreads.com: Before Barack Obama became a politician he was, among other things, a writer. Dreams from My Father is his masterpiece: a refreshing, revealing 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. He retraces the migration of his mother's family from Kansas to Hawaii, then to his childhood home in Indonesia. Finally he travels to Kenya, where he confronts the bitter truth of his father's life and at last reconciles his divided inheritance.

My review: This is another book that I have wanted to read for a while but I mentally moved it up on my TBR pile when he was elected President. I felt a sense of patriotic duty to read the words written by our President. Silly, probably but still how I feel. I found this book very interesting in parts, and very mundane in others. It gave a great description, full of stories and well described characters, of President Obama’s childhood and young adult years. I felt slightly boring surrounded by my suburban home with my plain/boring suburban family, as I read about his inner city work, his monetary troubles and his travels around Africa. His family history is full of drama and eccentric people, all struggling with their own demons in a rapidly changing world full of racial tension, gender tension and socio-economic tension. His family in Africa was an interesting set of people, some fully lost in the cultural environment of their heritage and those struggling like President Obama, to figure out just where they belonged. He had his own struggles (and I am sure those continue today) with “who is was” as a person, as a culture and as a race. He struggled with how to remain true to the Black race, but reconcile that with his White mother and grandparents, being bi-racial came with its own set of guilt and apprehension. This book brought me a new appreciation of the President and his past life before the politics with suits and ties.

Grade: C.

Finished: May 27, 2010

2010 Count: 38