What was dreams from my father about

Three-time winner: Small Publisher of the Year. Your basket is empty. Shopping Basket. Share this book share Teaching notes openbook High resolution cover picture Preview this book books. About the Author. Other Titles by Barack Obama. He was enrolled in the fifth grade at Punahou School, a private college-preparatory school, where he was one of six black students.

Obama attended Punahou School from the 5th grade until his graduation from the 12th grade, in Obama writes: "For my grandparents, my admission into Punahou Academy heralded the start of something grand, an elevation in the family status that they took great pains to let everyone know. He introduced Obama to the African-American community. He describes having lived a "party" lifestyle of drug and alcohol use.

Upon graduation, Obama worked for a year in business. He moved to Chicago, where he worked for a non-profit as a community organizer in the Altgeld Gardens housing project on the city's mostly black South Side. Obama recounts the difficulty of the experience, as his program faced resistance from entrenched community leaders and apathy on the part of the established bureaucracy. During this period, Obama first visited Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ, which became the center of his spiritual life.

He recounts part of this experience in the final, emotional third of the book. Obama used his memoir to reflect on his personal experiences with race and race relations in the United States.

In early , for many people in the U. I used the moment to look back at Barack Obama before he was president, before he was a US Senator and a state senator for Illinois, and discover the making of the man in his memoir Dreams from My Father. Overall, I'd give this 3. I very much enjoyed parts of Obama's journey to adulthood, especially his childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia which I found interesting and well-written, and while the later chapters detailing the consuming, difficult work of community organizing in Chicago and then meeting his extended family in Kenya prior to beginning law school also offer great insight, they are a bit less structurally sound, more peppered with rhetoric, less narrative oriented than the previous chapters.

But it's a fascinating glimpse at the early life of the 44th president in his own words, and I enjoyed seeing the anecdotal threads that connected to Obama's personality and policies during his presidency. And his meditations on race relations and his own personal struggle with identity were enlightening, and I personally found it intriguing and answered some questions I'd had about Obama's self-categorization as being black, and not biracial. Above all though, you get a firsthand glimpse of the young "Barry" Obama becoming Barack, and what it meant to be a biracial and a black man coming of age in the 60s, 70s and early 80s.

His writing and he are intelligent and compassionate, but sometimes the writing style can turn a bit self-indulgent or smug, a criticism lobbed during Obama's presidency but much more subdued than in Dreams with My Father , showing the progress and maturity of a man more comfortable in his own intelligence and skin. He writes of his rage and his anger, but also his vulnerability and fear, of and for himself, and of and for the world he inhabits, and sometimes neither party knows quite what to do with each other.

I both understood and was puzzled by some of his feelings of loathing and anger towards himself and US society: I too am a biracial American with a black father and a white mother, though female and with two American parents born and raised, and I personally could connect with various aspects of his struggle and the larger struggle of the black community.

But I've never had to face a choice or confusion over what race to be or how to identify myself: I was raised to think of myself as both black and white, as biracial. But reading his memoir, and seeing just how different it can be to be a biracial child of the 60s to late 70s, versus me, born in the late 80s coming of age in the 90s and 00s, I definitely got a much better, fuller, deeper understanding of how, where and why Obama came to his own self-identification that still allowed for the embrace of his diverse background.

I hadn't heard of Obama or Dreams from My Father when it was first published in like most Americans, plus I was nine , and while I was well aware of the book in when it was re-released just after his famous DNC keynote address, I just never ended up reading it. Reading it now, over two decades after it was first published, I've gained a much better appreciation both for Barack Obama, President, but even more so Barack Obama, person, and even if the version we meet in Dreams with My Father is simply a snapshot in time, the major elements of all the best attributes and actions of Obama are visible.

And even if I had some occasional issues with the writing, tone, pacing, I overall found this a worthy read, informative and entertaining and thought provoking. It was a privilege to read through Obama's very personal struggles and difficulties and feel his compassion for others, knowing what path that man would take, and it's a fantastic story: from being estranged from the world, he would go on to lead it.

Lorenzo Pilla. Forget for a moment who the author has become. This is not a book written by a politician or a would-be president. It's a book that was written by someone who subsequently became those things.

For that reason, it's a very honest account of an American coming to terms with who he is and where he's from. As a bonus, Obama happens to be an excellent writer. The First American. The Line Becomes a River. The Sunflower. Simon Wiesenthal. At the Dark End of the Street. Danielle L. Reading Lolita in Tehran. Call Me American. Abdi Nor Iftin. Edwidge Danticat. Life Is So Good. Richard Glaubman and George Dawson.

The Truths We Hold. Kamala Harris. Marjane Satrapi. Sonia Nazario. Finding My Voice. Valerie Jarrett. The Return Pulitzer Prize Winner. Hisham Matar. The Undocumented Americans. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed necolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. We were alienated.

After all, there were thousands of so-called campus radicals, most of them white and tenured and happily tolerated. No, it remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names.

On its own, the quote makes Obama appear racially militant. This is emphasized in the preceding paragraph, where Obama describes himself as someone compensating for insecurity in his "racial credentials. Sailer, Steve. False Quotes. Doctored Quotes We next turn to a quote that is manipulated to make it sound as though Obama is saying he would "never emulate" a white man, when he was actually describing a personal struggle to come to terms with his own mixed-race ancestry, and the failings of blacks and whites alike.

Another doctored quote is trimmed to make Obama sound as though he is wary of working for a white man because of his race, when Obama actually wrote that the "problem" of race had been raised by the man himself.

Context, Please Other quotes in the e-mail are offered without their full context, which we offer here. And finally … Misleading e-mail: From Dreams of My Father : ; "It remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names. The Audacity of Hope.