A fairly excellent and introspective work divided into 3 sections: Origins, Chicago, and Kenya.

Released to a Little Free Library. Happy hunting (and happy reading)!!!

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I'm glad I finally read Obama's first book / memoir; I had thought that it'd feel dated given the state of the world now, but it wasn't. It was nice to read how reflective, thoughtful, and deliberate the author is concerning his identity, his upbringing, his imaginings of his ancestries, and his father, whom he didn't get to know when growing up. We get to witness how people dealt with race relations in the heyday of rise of Black representation in Chicago politics, what it meant to be a community organizer, how his grandparents in Hawaii brought him up, and finally his first visit to Kenya, wherein we are treated to stories of his ancestors--how they navigated modernity, colonialism, a transition from a agrarian way of life to modernity. The voices he brought in (esp. his sister Auma) provided much resonance and complexity to his life that I had not experienced before.

I initially had this at 3 stars, because I felt it was overwritten and overly verbose, in need of a stricter edit. I've come to appreciate the story more (or at least, overlook the book's verbosity because of the weight of the subject matter). There were elements of the book that alluded to other books that he might have mentioned here, or books that he enjoyed. For example, some parts of his writing remind me of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, or Netherland by Joseph O'Neill (which is a book he recommended early in his presidency).

I thought the Kenya segment of the book (the book is split into three segments) was the strongest.



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