The book, the storytelling by President Obama, the life story, everything is captivating.
The story is a foundation for a person who later becomes one of the most powerful person in the world. Though it was written long before Mr. Obama became President, it paves way to the future.
Brilliantly written, though would be stretched at some points.
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Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (Canons) Kindle Edition
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Barack Obama
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Barack Obama
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Publication date3 June 2007
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Product description
From Booklist
Obama argues with himself on almost every page of this lively autobiographical conversation. He gets you to agree with him, and then he brings in a counternarrative that seems just as convincing. Son of a white American mother and of a black Kenyan father whom he never knew, Obama grew up mainly in Hawaii. After college, he worked for three years as a community organizer on Chicago's South Side. Then, finally, he went to Kenya, to find the world of his dead father, his "authentic" self. Will the truth set you free, Obama asks? Or will it disappoint? Both, it seems. His search for himself as a black American is rooted in the particulars of his daily life; it also reads like a wry commentary about all of us. He dismisses stereotypes of the "tragic mulatto" and then shows how much we are all caught between messy contradictions and disparate communities. He discovers that Kenya has 400 different tribes, each of them with stereotypes of the others. Obama is candid about racism and poverty and corruption, in Chicago and in Kenya. Yet he does find community and authenticity, not in any romantic cliche{}, but with "honest, decent men and women who have attainable ambitions and the determination to see them through." Hazel Rochman
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From the Inside Flap
on of a white American mother and a black African father, writes an elegant and compelling biography that powerfully articulates America's racial battleground and tells of his search for his place in black America. 8 pages of photos.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
About the Author
BARACK OBAMA was elected President of the United States on November 4, 2008. He is also the author of the New York Times bestseller The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
A remarkable story, beautifully told. -- Robert McCrum * * Observer * * Whatever else people expect from a politician, it's not usually a beautifully written personal memoir steeped in honesty. Barack Obama has produced one. -- Oona King * * The Times * * Obama's writing is characterised throughout by a graceful eloquence, a generosity of perception and spirit rare in young men of many gifts and charisma...here is a testimony for the ages. -- Candace Allen * * Independent * * It is an almost illicit pleasure to be reading the unspun memories of a man who may yet become president of the US. * * Guardian * * This book is simply justified, whatever its long-term political significance may or may not be, as a rich and rewarding read * * Herald * * ...it is a well-written account of Obama's struggle to establish his own views on identity and race, and all the more entertaining for its honesty. -- Elaine Moore * * Financial Times * * With its honesty and cool language, and by virtue of having a story worth telling, the book impresses far more than the typical political memoir. -- Colin Waters * * Sunday Herald * * Obama has written a memoir . . . that evokes the anguish of miscegenation yet culminates in a cry of faith in human community . . . Obama is a born narrator, with a mastery of colour, scene and personality, deftly stirring them into the melting pot of a shared American identity. Rarely has that identity found so vivid a portraitist. -- Simon Jenkins * * Sunday Times * * Because he held to the good and transcended the bad, in Obama's genesis millions of us will find hope . . . his search to know and forgive his absent Kenyan father holds lessons for us all. Especially in relative terms, his clear prose is refreshing. -- Ross Leckie * * The Times * * The only politician's life I have read that made me cry . . . elegant and surprising prose as well as a solid personal statement. -- Ian Kelly * * The Times * * It's touching, revealing, brave and generous . . . unprecedentedly well written for any politician. * * Evening Standard * *
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Preface to the 2004 Edition
Almost a decade has passed since this book was first published. As I mention in the original introduction, the opportunity to write the book came while I was in law school, the result of my election as the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. In the wake of some modest publicity, I received an advance from a publisher and went to work with the belief that the story of my family, and my efforts to understand that story, might speak in some way to the fissures of race that have characterized the American experience, as well as the fluid state of identity -- the leaps through time, the collision of cultures -- that mark our modern life.
Like most first-time authors, I was filled with hope and despair upon the book’s publication -- hope that the book might succeed beyond my youthful dreams, despair that I had failed to say anything worth saying. The reality fell somewhere in between. The reviews were mildly favorable. People actually showed up at the readings my publisher arranged. The sales were underwhelming. And, after a few months, I went on with the business of my life, certain that my career as an author would be short-lived, but glad to have survived the process with my dignity more or less intact.
I had little time for reflection over the next ten years. I ran a voter registration project in the 1992 election cycle, began a civil rights practice, and started teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago. My wife and I bought a house, were blessed with two gorgeous, healthy, and mischievous daughters, and struggled to pay the bills. When a seat in the state legislature opened up in 1996, some friends persuaded me to run for the office, and I won. I had been warned, before taking office, that state politics lacks the glamour of its Washington counterpart; one labors largely in obscurity, mostly on topics that mean a great deal to some but that the average man or woman on the street can safely ignore (the regulation of mobile homes, say, or the tax consequences of farm equipment depreciation). Nonetheless, I found the work satisfying, mostly because the scale of state politics allows for concrete results -- an expansion of health insurance for poor children, or a reform of laws that send innocent men to death row -- within a meaningful time frame. And too, because within the capitol building of a big, industrial state, one sees every day the face of a nation in constant conversation: inner-city mothers and corn and bean farmers, immigrant day laborers alongside suburban investment bankers -- all jostling to be heard, all ready to tell their stories.
A few months ago, I won the Democratic nomination for a seat as the U.S. senator from Illinois. It was a difficult race, in a crowded field of well-funded, skilled, and prominent candidates; without organizational backing or personal wealth, a black man with a funny name, I was considered a long shot. And so, when I won a majority of the votes in the Democratic primary, winning in white areas as well as black, in the suburbs as well as Chicago, the reaction that followed echoed the response to my election to the Law Review. Mainstream commentators expressed surprise and genuine hope that my victory signaled a broader change in our racial politics. Within the black community, there was a sense of pride regarding my accomplishment, a pride mingled with frustration that fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education and forty years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, we should still be celebrating the possibility (and only the possibility, for I have a tough general election coming up) that I might be the sole African American -- and only the third since Reconstruction -- to serve in the Senate. My family, friends, and I were mildly bewildered by the attention, and constantly aware of the gulf between the hard sheen of media reports and the messy, mundane realities of life as it is truly lived.
Just as that spate of publicity prompted my publisher’s interest a decade ago, so has this fresh round of news clippings encouraged the book’s re-publication. For the first time in many years, I’ve pulled out a copy and read a few chapters to see how much my voice may have changed over time. I confess to wincing every so often at a poorly chosen word, a mangled sentence, an expression of emotion that seems indulgent or overly practiced. I have the urge to cut the book by fifty pages or so, possessed as I am with a keener appreciation for brevity. I cannot honestly say, however, that the voice in this book is not mine -- that I would tell the story much differently today than I did ten years ago, even if certain passages have proven to be inconvenient politically, the grist for pundit commentary and opposition research.
What has changed, of course, dramatically, decisively, is the context in which the book might now be read. I began writing against a backdrop of Silicon Valley and a booming stock market; the collapse of the Berlin Wall; Mandela -- in slow, sturdy steps -- emerging from prison to lead a country; the signing of peace accords in Oslo. Domestically, our cultural debates -- around guns and abortion and rap lyrics -- seemed so fierce precisely because Bill Clinton’s Third Way, a scaled-back welfare state without grand ambition but without sharp edges, seemed to describe a broad, underlying consensus on bread-and-butter issues, a consensus to which even George W. Bush’s first campaign, with its “compassionate conservatism,” would have to give a nod. Internationally, writers announced the end of history, the ascendance of free markets and liberal democracy, the replacement of old hatreds and wars between nations with virtual communities and battles for market share.
And then, on September 11, 2001, the world fractured.
It’s beyond my skill as a writer to capture that day, and the days that would follow -- the planes, like specters, vanishing into steel and glass; the slow-motion cascade of the towers crumbling into themselves; the ash-covered figures wandering the streets; the anguish and the fear. Nor do I pretend to understand the stark nihilism that drove the terrorists that day and that drives their brethren still. My powers of empathy, my ability to reach into another’s heart, cannot penetrate the blank stares of those who would murder innocents with abstract, serene satisfaction.
What I do know is that history returned that day with a vengeance; that, in fact, as Faulkner reminds us, the past is never dead and buried -- it isn’t even past. This collective history, this past, directly touches my own. Not merely because the bombs of Al Qaeda have marked, with an eerie precision, some of the landscapes of my life -- the buildings and roads and faces of Nairobi, Bali, Manhattan; not merely because, as a consequence of 9/11, my name is an irresistible target of mocking websites from overzealous Republican operatives. But also because the underlying struggle -- between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together, and those who would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us -- is the struggle set forth, on a miniature scale, in this book.
I know, I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago’s South Side, how narrow the path is for them between humiliation and untrammeled fury, how easily they slip into violence and despair. I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder -- alternating as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware -- is inadequate to the task. I know that the hardening of lines, the embrace of fundamentalism and tribe, dooms us all.
And so what was a more interior, intimate effort on my part, to understand this struggle and to find my place in it, has converged with a broader public debate, a debate in which I am professionally engaged, one that will shape our lives and the lives of our children for many years to come.
The policy implications of all this are a topic for another book. Let me end instead on a more personal note. Most of the characters in this book remain a part of my life, albeit in varying degrees -- a function of work, children, geography, and turns of fate.
The exception is my mother, whom we lost, with a brutal swiftness, to cancer a few months after this book was published.
She had spent the previous ten years doing what she loved. She traveled the world, working in the distant villages of Asia and Africa, helping women buy a sewing machine or a milk cow or an education that might give them a foothold in the world’s economy. She gathered friends from high and low, took long walks, stared at the moon, and foraged through the local markets of Delhi or Marrakesh for some trifle, a scarf or stone carving that would make her laugh or please the eye. She wrote reports, read novels, pestered her children, and dreamed of grandchildren.
We saw each other frequently, our bond unbroken. During the writing of this book, she would read the drafts, correcting stories that I had misunderstood, careful not to comment on my characterizations of her but quick to explain or defend the less flattering aspects of my father’s character. She managed her illness with grace and good humor, and she helped my sister and me push on with our lives, despite our dread, our denials, our sudden constrictions of the heart.
I think sometimes that had I known she would not survive her illness, I might have written a different book -- less a meditatio... --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
Almost a decade has passed since this book was first published. As I mention in the original introduction, the opportunity to write the book came while I was in law school, the result of my election as the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. In the wake of some modest publicity, I received an advance from a publisher and went to work with the belief that the story of my family, and my efforts to understand that story, might speak in some way to the fissures of race that have characterized the American experience, as well as the fluid state of identity -- the leaps through time, the collision of cultures -- that mark our modern life.
Like most first-time authors, I was filled with hope and despair upon the book’s publication -- hope that the book might succeed beyond my youthful dreams, despair that I had failed to say anything worth saying. The reality fell somewhere in between. The reviews were mildly favorable. People actually showed up at the readings my publisher arranged. The sales were underwhelming. And, after a few months, I went on with the business of my life, certain that my career as an author would be short-lived, but glad to have survived the process with my dignity more or less intact.
I had little time for reflection over the next ten years. I ran a voter registration project in the 1992 election cycle, began a civil rights practice, and started teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago. My wife and I bought a house, were blessed with two gorgeous, healthy, and mischievous daughters, and struggled to pay the bills. When a seat in the state legislature opened up in 1996, some friends persuaded me to run for the office, and I won. I had been warned, before taking office, that state politics lacks the glamour of its Washington counterpart; one labors largely in obscurity, mostly on topics that mean a great deal to some but that the average man or woman on the street can safely ignore (the regulation of mobile homes, say, or the tax consequences of farm equipment depreciation). Nonetheless, I found the work satisfying, mostly because the scale of state politics allows for concrete results -- an expansion of health insurance for poor children, or a reform of laws that send innocent men to death row -- within a meaningful time frame. And too, because within the capitol building of a big, industrial state, one sees every day the face of a nation in constant conversation: inner-city mothers and corn and bean farmers, immigrant day laborers alongside suburban investment bankers -- all jostling to be heard, all ready to tell their stories.
A few months ago, I won the Democratic nomination for a seat as the U.S. senator from Illinois. It was a difficult race, in a crowded field of well-funded, skilled, and prominent candidates; without organizational backing or personal wealth, a black man with a funny name, I was considered a long shot. And so, when I won a majority of the votes in the Democratic primary, winning in white areas as well as black, in the suburbs as well as Chicago, the reaction that followed echoed the response to my election to the Law Review. Mainstream commentators expressed surprise and genuine hope that my victory signaled a broader change in our racial politics. Within the black community, there was a sense of pride regarding my accomplishment, a pride mingled with frustration that fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education and forty years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, we should still be celebrating the possibility (and only the possibility, for I have a tough general election coming up) that I might be the sole African American -- and only the third since Reconstruction -- to serve in the Senate. My family, friends, and I were mildly bewildered by the attention, and constantly aware of the gulf between the hard sheen of media reports and the messy, mundane realities of life as it is truly lived.
Just as that spate of publicity prompted my publisher’s interest a decade ago, so has this fresh round of news clippings encouraged the book’s re-publication. For the first time in many years, I’ve pulled out a copy and read a few chapters to see how much my voice may have changed over time. I confess to wincing every so often at a poorly chosen word, a mangled sentence, an expression of emotion that seems indulgent or overly practiced. I have the urge to cut the book by fifty pages or so, possessed as I am with a keener appreciation for brevity. I cannot honestly say, however, that the voice in this book is not mine -- that I would tell the story much differently today than I did ten years ago, even if certain passages have proven to be inconvenient politically, the grist for pundit commentary and opposition research.
What has changed, of course, dramatically, decisively, is the context in which the book might now be read. I began writing against a backdrop of Silicon Valley and a booming stock market; the collapse of the Berlin Wall; Mandela -- in slow, sturdy steps -- emerging from prison to lead a country; the signing of peace accords in Oslo. Domestically, our cultural debates -- around guns and abortion and rap lyrics -- seemed so fierce precisely because Bill Clinton’s Third Way, a scaled-back welfare state without grand ambition but without sharp edges, seemed to describe a broad, underlying consensus on bread-and-butter issues, a consensus to which even George W. Bush’s first campaign, with its “compassionate conservatism,” would have to give a nod. Internationally, writers announced the end of history, the ascendance of free markets and liberal democracy, the replacement of old hatreds and wars between nations with virtual communities and battles for market share.
And then, on September 11, 2001, the world fractured.
It’s beyond my skill as a writer to capture that day, and the days that would follow -- the planes, like specters, vanishing into steel and glass; the slow-motion cascade of the towers crumbling into themselves; the ash-covered figures wandering the streets; the anguish and the fear. Nor do I pretend to understand the stark nihilism that drove the terrorists that day and that drives their brethren still. My powers of empathy, my ability to reach into another’s heart, cannot penetrate the blank stares of those who would murder innocents with abstract, serene satisfaction.
What I do know is that history returned that day with a vengeance; that, in fact, as Faulkner reminds us, the past is never dead and buried -- it isn’t even past. This collective history, this past, directly touches my own. Not merely because the bombs of Al Qaeda have marked, with an eerie precision, some of the landscapes of my life -- the buildings and roads and faces of Nairobi, Bali, Manhattan; not merely because, as a consequence of 9/11, my name is an irresistible target of mocking websites from overzealous Republican operatives. But also because the underlying struggle -- between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together, and those who would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us -- is the struggle set forth, on a miniature scale, in this book.
I know, I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago’s South Side, how narrow the path is for them between humiliation and untrammeled fury, how easily they slip into violence and despair. I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder -- alternating as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware -- is inadequate to the task. I know that the hardening of lines, the embrace of fundamentalism and tribe, dooms us all.
And so what was a more interior, intimate effort on my part, to understand this struggle and to find my place in it, has converged with a broader public debate, a debate in which I am professionally engaged, one that will shape our lives and the lives of our children for many years to come.
The policy implications of all this are a topic for another book. Let me end instead on a more personal note. Most of the characters in this book remain a part of my life, albeit in varying degrees -- a function of work, children, geography, and turns of fate.
The exception is my mother, whom we lost, with a brutal swiftness, to cancer a few months after this book was published.
She had spent the previous ten years doing what she loved. She traveled the world, working in the distant villages of Asia and Africa, helping women buy a sewing machine or a milk cow or an education that might give them a foothold in the world’s economy. She gathered friends from high and low, took long walks, stared at the moon, and foraged through the local markets of Delhi or Marrakesh for some trifle, a scarf or stone carving that would make her laugh or please the eye. She wrote reports, read novels, pestered her children, and dreamed of grandchildren.
We saw each other frequently, our bond unbroken. During the writing of this book, she would read the drafts, correcting stories that I had misunderstood, careful not to comment on my characterizations of her but quick to explain or defend the less flattering aspects of my father’s character. She managed her illness with grace and good humor, and she helped my sister and me push on with our lives, despite our dread, our denials, our sudden constrictions of the heart.
I think sometimes that had I known she would not survive her illness, I might have written a different book -- less a meditatio... --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
From AudioFile
Barack Obama, a black man raised by his white mother and grandparents, decided to journey to Kenya to learn more about his African father after receiving news of his death. This memoir is not about his father's life, but about Obama's, and he brings that home with an intimate tone rather than that of his public speeches. (His 2004 Democratic Convention keynote address is included at the end.) Throughout the book, the U.S. Senator looks at race from the point of view of someone who has seen and been part of a variety of cultures, and he explains how his perspective shaped his views. The book, written in 1995, before his election to the Illinois Senate, gives listeners a chance to learn more about a young senator who has recently made news by speaking out on the Patriot Act and President Bush's next Supreme Court nomination. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
From the Back Cover
Includes the senator's speech from the 2004 Democratic National Convention!
In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father--a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man--has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey--first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother's family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father's life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father--a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man--has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey--first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother's family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father's life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
Product details
- ASIN : B002RI9SB0
- Publisher : Canongate Canons; Main edition (3 June 2007)
- Language : English
- File size : 3296 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 462 pages
- Page numbers source ISBN : 1782119256
- Best Sellers Rank: #3,981 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
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Reviewed in India on 30 August 2019
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Reviewed in India on 12 October 2020
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A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995) is a memoir by Barack Obama, that explores the events of his early years in Honolulu and Chicago up until his entry into law school in 1988. Obama originally published his memoir in 1995, when he was starting his political campaign for the Illinois Senate.He had been elected as the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review in 1990. According to The New York Times, Obama modeled Dreams from My Father on Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man.
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Reviewed in India on 30 December 2020
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Being a US president is a big achievement but it is clearly visible that, it was not planned.
Working in root level made him involve because he knew about "basic human problem".
We can learn from anyone, anywhere, any source !!! That's what made Mr. Obama much different from many US President, many human being.
Working in root level made him involve because he knew about "basic human problem".
We can learn from anyone, anywhere, any source !!! That's what made Mr. Obama much different from many US President, many human being.
Reviewed in India on 15 July 2013
Verified Purchase
This book covers the early life of Barack Obama up to his first real job as a community organiser and was written when he was 33. The writing is fluid and at some passages are beautiful. It reveals a very self aware, extremely intelligent and very self conscious person trying to grow up battling the contradictions of growing up in a mixed race family.
On the down side, some passages are a bit preachy and Obama leaves out crucial bits of information, like why did he choose to become a community worker is not adequately explained in my view. Also he leaves out his political views and does not disclose his political ambitions or lack of it.
But overall a highly engaging and rewarding read. The last passage of his trip to Kenya is easily the best. In the end the book is really what the title is, Obama and his understanding of his father's life and why he took the decisions he did going right into the heart of racial relations in US and Africa.
On the down side, some passages are a bit preachy and Obama leaves out crucial bits of information, like why did he choose to become a community worker is not adequately explained in my view. Also he leaves out his political views and does not disclose his political ambitions or lack of it.
But overall a highly engaging and rewarding read. The last passage of his trip to Kenya is easily the best. In the end the book is really what the title is, Obama and his understanding of his father's life and why he took the decisions he did going right into the heart of racial relations in US and Africa.
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Reviewed in India on 6 March 2021
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Obama gives an insight into his childhood and early years. Very well expressed into great detail his early experiences in Hawaii, Indonesia, Kenya and USA.
Reviewed in India on 24 November 2020
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This is not a book review. This post is regarding the quality of the book delivered
The book looks old and used. Quality is bad. The pages are as if it's drenched before. Bad quality book
The book looks old and used. Quality is bad. The pages are as if it's drenched before. Bad quality book
Reviewed in India on 18 December 2016
Verified Purchase
Enjoyed reading the book. Loads of things to learn from Mr Obama's life. His depiction of racism and inheritance is awfully beautiful. Each and every youth can identify himself/herself with the quest for identity that Mr Obama pursues, though in a different context but the bottom-line remains the same.
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Reviewed in India on 18 February 2019
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Amazing book..... inspirational one....!🧡💚💛💜
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GEORGINA R.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Should be mandatory reading
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 23 January 2019Verified Purchase
Barack Obama is a superb writer. You might expect that from such a persuasive orator, but remember he wrote this book long before he reached the heady-heights of running for US President. And he writes with such literary skill. You can almost see, feel, touch and smell the faraway lands of which he writes... Hawaii, Indonesia, Kenya and then of course the grittiness of NYC, Chicago. More than this though, which is beautiful and worthy in its own right, this book offers insight. Insight into what it means to be mixed race in a developed nation such as America, a minority, and the constant drive to find meaning and your place of comfort in the world.
Personally I think we should all read this book. Firstly, because for those of us who are non-black we will learn an awful lot that we didn't know about how it feels to be black in America. And secondly, because the majority of us are part of a minority group in some aspect of our lives. This book teaches us what being a minority can do to you, how difficult it can be, including how hard it is to come together as minorities and organise ourselves to bring about change. This book also teaches us that determination and small wins matter. That they can help make a difference. And that bringing about change is important at grassroots level and at leadership levels. It has also helped me to learn about 'organisation', which in itself is also fascinating.
Superb book. Someone should make this guy President.... ;-)
Personally I think we should all read this book. Firstly, because for those of us who are non-black we will learn an awful lot that we didn't know about how it feels to be black in America. And secondly, because the majority of us are part of a minority group in some aspect of our lives. This book teaches us what being a minority can do to you, how difficult it can be, including how hard it is to come together as minorities and organise ourselves to bring about change. This book also teaches us that determination and small wins matter. That they can help make a difference. And that bringing about change is important at grassroots level and at leadership levels. It has also helped me to learn about 'organisation', which in itself is also fascinating.
Superb book. Someone should make this guy President.... ;-)
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SocialBookshelves.com
4.0 out of 5 stars
and it’s pretty easy to see how his early life is still ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 22 November 2015Verified Purchase
You might have heard of Mr. Obama before – you know, he’s the president of that country that everyone keeps banging on about. This is his first book, written and released before he even got in to politics, and created at the behest of a publishing company after he became the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.
In many ways, that seems to make the book somehow pure, as though it’s a preserved distilling of the president’s personality when he was a younger man, and it’s pretty easy to see how his early life is still shaping him, even today. In fact, after reading this, I’ve found that it feels as though I know him, as though I could predict how he’ll react in different situations.
But really, that’s not what this book is about – he may be the president now, but that wasn’t always the case, and his book looks back at his early life and examines his feelings towards the father that was never there, his African roots and what being a black American actually means. It’s a fascinating study of race relations in America in the 1970s and 1980s, and what’s more poignant is the fact that while Obama does indeed look at the differences between black people and white people, he eventually concludes that the colour of our skin doesn’t define us.
That’s not to say that he doesn’t face struggles along the way, though – Obama also examines his own biases, and the unintentional way in which we come to judgements all of the time. He himself is guilty of stereotyping, but he tries to correct himself and that in itself is honourable.
Of course, it’s also fascinating to read about his exploits as a kid, and his trips to Kenya and Indonesia, or his work in Chicago trying to make the city a better place before he eventually applied for and was accepted in to Harvard. Turns out that Barack is a pretty good writer, and it shows – it was of a professional quality, with no typos or unnatural sounding sentences. Even the dialogue that he recreates sounds natural and fits perfectly with the character, who are of course real people.
Overall, I’d say that this is well worth a read whether you’re an American or not, and whether or not Obama is still president by the time that you read this. The identity of the author doesn’t really matter – the book speaks for itself, and it has a lot of stuff to say to you, too.
In many ways, that seems to make the book somehow pure, as though it’s a preserved distilling of the president’s personality when he was a younger man, and it’s pretty easy to see how his early life is still shaping him, even today. In fact, after reading this, I’ve found that it feels as though I know him, as though I could predict how he’ll react in different situations.
But really, that’s not what this book is about – he may be the president now, but that wasn’t always the case, and his book looks back at his early life and examines his feelings towards the father that was never there, his African roots and what being a black American actually means. It’s a fascinating study of race relations in America in the 1970s and 1980s, and what’s more poignant is the fact that while Obama does indeed look at the differences between black people and white people, he eventually concludes that the colour of our skin doesn’t define us.
That’s not to say that he doesn’t face struggles along the way, though – Obama also examines his own biases, and the unintentional way in which we come to judgements all of the time. He himself is guilty of stereotyping, but he tries to correct himself and that in itself is honourable.
Of course, it’s also fascinating to read about his exploits as a kid, and his trips to Kenya and Indonesia, or his work in Chicago trying to make the city a better place before he eventually applied for and was accepted in to Harvard. Turns out that Barack is a pretty good writer, and it shows – it was of a professional quality, with no typos or unnatural sounding sentences. Even the dialogue that he recreates sounds natural and fits perfectly with the character, who are of course real people.
Overall, I’d say that this is well worth a read whether you’re an American or not, and whether or not Obama is still president by the time that you read this. The identity of the author doesn’t really matter – the book speaks for itself, and it has a lot of stuff to say to you, too.
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E J FLETT
5.0 out of 5 stars
A good, honest man
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 23 April 2017Verified Purchase
Finished this book just before Donald Trump's election, talk about chalk and cheese, what a fantasic, humble, decent guy Barack seems to be.I loved reading about his family life and how it formed his personality.
26 people found this helpful
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Anon
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 11 March 2017Verified Purchase
Beautifully written. As an African myself I was taken back in time to my own experiences good and bad. Obama conveys his journey with emotion and frankness. I struggled on many occasions to put this book down. It is captivating. Highly recommended...and hope you enjoy it as much as I did. I am proud of this book from my African brother from another mother.
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Jane Trueman
5.0 out of 5 stars
A great insight
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 4 May 2017Verified Purchase
I had this on my Kindle for months, thinking I must read it but wondering if it might be a bit heavy. How wrong I was. It's beautifully written and draws you in from the beginning. Obama's early life is full of surprises.
20 people found this helpful
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