Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
Barack Obama (Author)
(799)

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African Americans

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).

• Rank: #16574 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-09
• Released on: 2007-01-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 9.53" h x 1.50" w x 6.45" l, 1.63 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 464 pages

Description #1 by Walmart:

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

Description #2 by eBay - goodwillbks:

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance Barack Obama ISBN: 9780739321003 Publisher: Random House Audio Published date: May 3 2005 Audio CD COMMENTS: Used - Acceptable CDs / DVDs may have light surface scratches. Jewel case condition will vary. May or may not include liner notes. Digital Copy may or may not be present, one time use code may or may not be used. All returns must be authorized in advance.SKU: MEDRW09G-00-1286

Description #3 by HBO Shop:

Years before becoming the 44th President-elect of the United States Barack Obama published Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance a lyrical unsentimental and powerfully affecting memoir which became a #1 New York Times bestseller when it was reissued in 2004. It 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. Get the paperback Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama and get inspired.