Review: Dreams from My Father

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama was a fascinating personal account, and one I think I could have enjoyed even if the author hadn't been my President. Still, without his candidacy, I don't know that I'd have read it. I just don't do non-fiction. I'm sure glad I did, this time.

Written when he was still in law school, long before his meteoric rise in politics, the story is a well-formed history of his attitudes towards himself and others from his earliest days to his eventual "homecoming" in Kenya, with a family he had never known, in a place with which he longed to connect.

The book is shockingly honest. In his "Preface to the 2004 Edition," Obama admits that some "passages have proven to be inconvenient politically" -- and one can see that. Though many a man has had a wild youth, it's a rare man that would admit to some of the carousing, rule-breaking, drinking and drug use which are part of Obama's past, especially if politics were a potential path.

It's that honesty, though, that really caught me as I started this book. Barack Obama may not quite be Everyman, given his background, but he is Everyman in his desire to know himself. And the inclusion of stories that color his past as less-than-pure indicate to me that his political desires either formed later in life, or were clearly subservient to his desire to tell the truth of his journey.

Dreams from My Father taught me several things. One of them is that it's hard for a person with a clear father figure to appreciate how much of an anchor it provides in his life. Yet Obama clearly describes how the lack of one affected him. And though it continues to affect people throughout the world, it's Barack's story that Barack tells. He encounters many real people with many disparate views of, and approaches to, life; Barack does not judge. He examines, he describes, he reflects. His purpose is not to tell the stories of those people, but to show their attitudes and contemplate how exposure to them affected his own life.

We follow Barack Obama from Hawaii to California to Chicago and finally to Kenya. I will say that the stories in Chicago were the slowest part of the book, but they ultimately were crucial to understanding Obama's journey, and I don't think the entrancing final section on Kenya would have been nearly as powerful if we hadn't first seen the comparable situation of his American "brothers and sisters."

One very notable point about the book, and then you'll just have to read it for yourself. This is not a book about politics. It certainly has some political activities, but the primary and driving purpose is to tell the story of how Barack Obama went about forming a complete picture of himself as a person, given his relatively unique circumstance as the son of a Black African, and a White American. The things we learn about being black in America, about struggling to fill the void left by an absent father, about trying to help others while growing ourselves, are remarkably accessible in this personal story.

It's rare, I think, to have access to the personal history of one of our leaders written with such grace and clarity, and even rarer to have it penned before his rise to leadership. I look forward to understanding our President better from this view into his personal story of exploration and fulfillment.