Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (Random House Large Print (Cloth/Paper))
Selected Book Details
- Paperback
- Author: Barack Obama
- Publisher: Random House Large Print
- Release Date: April 2008
- ISBN-10: 0739328190
- ISBN-13: 9780739328194
- List Price: $25.95
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Summaries and Customer Reviews provided by Amazon
SummaryIn 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. |
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Grade-A Tripe
Rating: 
If you can get past the abominably poor language and grammar, composite characters, changed names, dramatized events, and fictionalized dialogue, your reward is...a tedious, overwrought, melodramatic, self-serving memoir about nothing from a 34-year old dilettante. Whether your politics place you on the left or right, the fact is DREAMS FROM MY FATHER is a clumsy, amateurish effort with little insight and even less truth, and it probably would have been more compelling and weighty had Obama waited until later in his life, after he actually accomplished something, to reflect on and write about his formative experiences. In contrast to the image propagated by mythologizers in his campaign and elements of the media, Obama demonstrates little skill as a writer and his work here falls far short of publication quality. DREAMS FROM MY FATHER shows that it's probably best for Obama that he didn't pursue a career as an author, though inarguably not so for the country.
Obama lies
Rating:
See.... in his own words.... lies and half-truths. This is a man who is dismantling our country and destroying the freedom we used to know. He has never been truthful except to say he is going to transform our country. Well, he is doing it and the sheeple on the left are buying it hook line and sinker.
Ghost Written Narcissism
Rating:
I read this and all recent books claimed to have been written by Obama. I also read that he had help from professional and ghost writers. Obama's books are more narcissism than evidence of a concern for social and economic justice under the US Constitution. Obama is just another great orator with less maturity, experience, and wisdom than most of our national and world thinkers. This book is just one more work of liberal Democrat propaganda. We all have dreams from our fathers...and mothers...but we choose to leave them out of print, so the book is just campaign and election fodder from a youthful and naive left-wing radical...and his even more left-wing and radical revolutionaries. At least Obama can truthfully claim to be African-American, an geographic-ethnic classification claimed in error by most other American blacks. After all, Obama may have been born in Africa and flown to Hawaii, or at least his father was a full African.
dreams from my father
Rating:
When I read the book I was fascinated by Obama desribing his own youth, his problems, thoughts, encounters, in such a candid and frank way. I found the idea entrapping to listen to the book being read by the author himself. So I purchased the CD. And I like listening to it.
Moreover, I have a dyslexic student who comes to me once a week to study English. I am going to take parts of the book and use it in combination with the CD to train his understanding of written and spoken English.
Nothing about Inheritance
Rating:
It took me (a person who reads a novel a week on average) 8 months to get through this book. I received it as a birthday present from my mother-in-law who thought it would be a good present for her "democratic son-in-law". It was a lovely thought, and appreciated. This book just doesn't fit the bill.
I did enjoy learning about Mr. Obama's childhood in Hawaii with his maternal grandparents and their attitudes toward race in contrast with the hate and angst coming from his "friends". I also really liked learning about his Kenyan relatives and their back story. The Chicago part of the book was really hard to get through and seemingly meaningless in relation to the purpose of the book.
Part of the problem here is that he stuck to a strictly linear telling of his life, with what he learned and when. But, what is most interesting and what influences us far more is our upbringing and our heritage (what this book seemingly purports to be about as well). Therefore, most of the last third of the book should have been up front and he should have given much more about his childhood.
Finally, I also felt like there was mostly just telling going on here (insert the infamous show versus tell tirade from English teachers everywhere). In other words, I got to hear about things that happened, but I never felt like I was there, as a part of it. This has to do with language and word choice mostly, but also because I never felt like I was inside Mr. Obama's head. I don't really know how he felt about different things or what connections he was making as he made them (which is kind of the purpose for telling the story linearly).
In summary, I felt like I got a good idea of the frustrations and difficulties of being a black man in America today (or, at least, 30 years ago), but I don't really see how this ties in with inheritance and his father's dreams.
If one of my college students turned in something like this for their own personal narrative, I would have given it a B- (a little above average for some things, but not meeting the needs of the assignment).
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