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| | Dreams from My Father |  | Author: Barack Obama
Category: Book
Buy New: $34.99
New (1) Collectible (1) from $34.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  321 reviews
Sales Rank: 2886570
Format: Abridged
Edition: Abridged
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.3 x 5.3 x 1
ISBN: 1602520275
Dewey Decimal Number: 320
EAN: 9781602520271
ASIN: 1602520275
Publication Date: May 2007
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
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Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 316 more reviews...
 Obama, a remarkable generalizer November 17, 2008
I have rarely been so privileged to read a book such as DREAMS OF MY FATHER. Obama reveals his thought processes as he struggled to find his place in the larger sicial fabric. Were that all, this would not be so great a book. But, he describes his maturation in thinking as he interacted and learned from others. And, while personally growng, he was able to empathize with others from virtually all walks of life, to relate to them and to abstract the essence of their needs and being. Finally, he was able to integrate those observations into a larger vision of society and how to effect it in a positive way. All of this is written in the most compelling language. He is a great and poetic writer.
Get to know Obama November 17, 2008
This man has a truly inspirational and amazing life and history. I devoured the book and came back for more. I've since recommended it to friends and family who have felt that they "don't really know the man".
Now that he's been elected, I hope everyone will seek out his books and get to know him a little better and let him touch your life as he's definitely touched mine.
Don't "know" Barack Obama? November 16, 2008
It's hard to see how anyone could validly ask "Do you really know Barack Obama?" when this little book is readily available and so readable. In the Information Age we've got so many sources about most of our political candidates that ignorance is no longer an excuse in the voting booth (or elsewhere, if you opt for a mail-in ballot).
Barack's narrative is modest, self-disclosing and completely lacking in the hubris that has poisoned the administration in Washington for the last 8 years. In short, I found this book completely genuine and honest. It convinced me that "what you see is what you'll get" in President #44.
"No Drama Obama" is *so* cool under pressure, and sets such high standards for personal responsibility that I feel I know him. Those traits come through in this book. He raises the bar for all of us: Blacks, Whites, Democrats, Republicans, Men and Women, GLBTS's, and religious minorities. Isn't that what our great experiment in Democracy is supposed to be all about?
I read most of "Audacity of Hope". My interest waned when I realized Pres. Obama's policies were pretty much a carbon copy of my own. Dreams from My Father convinced me that I share his ultimate objectiives, values and worries as a father, husband and human being as well.
I am an unrepentant Progressive, concerned more about our grandchildren's futures than those of my own generation. If you are a hardcore social Darwinist who espouses economic "survival of the fittest" and "May the Devil take the Hindmost" this book is not for you.
Best book ever November 16, 2008
a truly amazing book. an in depth look at Obama's life from childhood to adulthood. i recommand this book to young scholars who are curious about our next president's life.
A thoughtful new president November 15, 2008
I am impressed by Obama's ability to analyze himself. In "Dreams from my Father," he readily points out his adolescent flaws, frustrations, and misunderstandings in a way no sitting politician ever could. Historians should be very grateful that he wrote this before he ran for elected office. I cannot think of another memoir by a politician that seemed so unfiltered and human.
By the way, Obama is a beautiful writer. His sentences are smooth and at times lyrical. I look forward to having a president so well versed in the English language.
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