Location: Home :: Books on Racism & Discrimination :: Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

Need a quick gift? Try Amazon gift certificates.

Don't Forget To Visit:

The New Social Worker Online

SocialWorkJobBank

Online Continuing Education for Social Workers

Amazon.com Widgets

Related Categories

•	Blue Politics

Political Parties

Specialty Stores

Books

•	African-American & Black

Ethnic & National

Biographies & Memoirs

Subjects

•

General

Ethnic & National

Biographies & Memoirs

Subjects

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

enlarge

Author: Barack Obama
Publisher: Crown
Category: Book

List Price: ~~$25.95~~
Buy Used: $8.70
as of 11/21/2009 04:40 PST details
You Save: $17.25 (66%)

New (44) Used (33) from $8.70

Seller: goodwillbooks

Media: Hardcover
Edition: Reprint
Pages: 464
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.7
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.2 x 1.6

ISBN: 0307383415
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.04960730092
EAN: 9780307383419
ASIN: 0307383415

Publication Date: January 9, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days

Features:

•	ISBN13: 9780307383419
•	Condition: NEW
•	Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
•	Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Similar Items:

The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (Vintage)

Change We Can Believe In: Barack Obama's Plan to Renew America's Promise

Great Speeches by African Americans: Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Barack Obama, and Others (Thrift Edition)

The American Journey of Barack Obama

Barack Obama in His Own Words

Editorial Reviews:

Product Description
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.

Pictured in lefthand photograph on cover: Habiba Akumu Hussein and Barack Obama, Sr. (President Obama's paternal grandmother and his father as a young boy). Pictured in righthand photograph on cover: Stanley Dunham and Ann Dunham (President Obama's maternal grandfather and his mother as a young girl).

Customer Reviews:

Showing reviews 1-5 of 100

1 2 3 4 5 6 ...20 Next »

Grade-A Tripe November 11, 2009
Brian Brockmeyer (New York)
5 out of 6 found this review helpful

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.

1 out of 5 stars

Obama lies November 9, 2009
Informed Voter (Vancouver, WA USA)
4 out of 8 found this review helpful

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.

1 out of 5 stars

Ghost Written Narcissism October 28, 2009
James S. Moore (Seattle, Washington, United States)
6 out of 16 found this review helpful

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.

5 out of 5 stars

dreams from my father October 27, 2009
Mag Annette Withalm (Graz, Steiermark)
0 out of 3 found this review helpful

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.

3 out of 5 stars

Nothing about Inheritance October 26, 2009
Garrett Winn (Eagle Mountain, UT USA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful

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).

Showing reviews 1-5 of 100

1 2 3 4 5 6 ...20 Next »

CERTAIN CONTENT THAT APPEARS ON THIS SITE COMES FROM AMAZON SERVICES LLC. THIS CONTENT IS PROVIDED ‘AS IS’ AND IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE OR REMOVAL AT ANY TIME.

Copyright 2009 White Hat Communications.
Disclaimer: The products referenced on this site are manufactured and sold by parties other than The New Social Worker/White Hat Communications. We make no representations regarding either the products or any information vendors offer about their products.

Visit our poster store for unique social issues posters.

Amazon.com Widgets