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| Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
Hardcover
Edition: Reprint
Author: Barack Obama
Publisher: Crown
Release Date: 2007-01-09
ISBN-10: 0307383415
ISBN-13: 9780307383419
List Price: $25.95
Average Customer Rating:
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Change We Can Believe In: Barack Obama's Plan to Renew America's Promise
ISBN-10: 0307460452
ISBN-13: 9780307460455
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ISBN-13: 9781579127565
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Great Speeches by African Americans: Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Barack Obama, and Others (Thrift Edition)
ISBN-10: 0486447618
ISBN-13: 9780486447612
List Price:$3.50
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Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
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.
Great
| Customer Rating: | | The book was a new paper cover. It came promptly and was packaged well. In perfect condition. |
Researching the Man
| Customer Rating: | | The man who wrote the book does not seem to be the man presented for the Presidency. This promotes a somewhat scary situation of mind-set of the man. It is a must read before the election. |
great leader, great background
| Customer Rating: | | This will clear up any doubts about the character of this man and his appropriateness to lead our country. |
An interesting campaign memoir with many weaknesses
| Customer Rating:  | Obama's story captured my interest, because it reads like a well written novel and it is a little bit exotic -- like anthropology 101, my favorite class as freshman in college. But I tried to read it as a political document that it ultimately is and was surprised in how many places in his writing he left potential attack points lying around for the opposition to pick up, a few examples are the following:
On page 295, Mr. Obama is moved to tears by Reverend Wright's, (yes the fierce anti-American ranter) sermon. He leaves in the worst kind of ghetto language. Such a contrast to when he is speaking from his well written scripts. Does he not realize that offensive words like that have the potential to increase the size of the hidden Bubba vote (voters who cling to their religion and guns not detectable by polls). He leaves the impression that he is forever struggling with his identity (black, white, Indonesian, Muslim, Reverend Wright Christian, Luo tribe in Kenya, whatever). His life is a journey to find himself. Many voters are bound to ask do we want his journey to lead to the White House. Will all the confusion disappear when he deep down asks himself: "Who am I?" and he can finally answer: "Mr. President"!? Or would he still be the Obama depicted in this book. Would he make decisions in the national interest or would they be warped by an identity crises at the wrong time?
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Intelligent, beautiful and touching
| Customer Rating: | | The first few chapters reflecting on his childhood are incredibly lyrical and beautiful. Later chapters, on life in Chicago and Kenya, are sometimes painful to read--as he encounters in those years social and family problems not amenable to solutions. In this book you can see the real stuff this man is made of--a thinking person who is deliberate in his actions and capable of inspiring others. |
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