Dreams from my father

 Dreams from My Father

by Barack Obama

    
            In the past few months (leading up to the 2012 election) we have been inundated with information, both positive and negative, about American President Barack Obama. The media has extensively covered everything from his plans to improve the economy to his international affairs policies. With the attention on the future of the United States for the next four years in the hands of Obama, it is interesting to look at his past to see how he became the man that has defied the odds.

Barack Obama has broken many racial barriers in his lifetime. When attending Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Obama was elected as the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. He was approached to write a memoir after this significant accomplishment. After graduating, he led one of the most successful voter registration drives in state history. He worked as a civil rights lawyer and a professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago. Obama was elected to Illinois State Senate in 1996 and the U.S. Senate in 2004. On 20 January 2009, Barack Obama was sworn in as the first African-American president in history. Last week Obama was re-elected for a second term as the President of the United States.

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance was written nine years before his presidency, and re-released in 2004. He tells of his life as a child of an interracial union and the obstacles that he had to overcome. He begins his memoir in New York when he hears that his father had been killed in a car collision. Although Obama never really knew his father, he listened to the stories of the mysterious man that were told by his mother and grandparents. The news of his father’s death provokes a curiosity in the young man and sets on a journey to learn more about his African heritage. 

Obama travels to Kenya to learn more about his father and his own heritage. He learns difficult information about his father and also sees the reality of dearth and tribal conflict that plague the impoverished nation. During his visit, Obama is inspired by the spirit of strength and hope of the Kenyan people despite the struggles that they face. While working as a community organizer in Chicago during a time of political and racial conflict, Barack Obama integrates into his work his newly acquired appreciation for community spirit and forgiveness, as well as the possibility of faith in the midst of adversity. 

Barack Obama’s book Dreams from my Father is an inspiring story about the search for self-identity as well as racial relations in the United States. It gives a poetic, cynical yet captivating account of his search to find meaning in his life as a black American.