Barack Obama; Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance is a memoir by current United States Presidential candidate Barack Obama of Illinois. It was first published in 1995 after Obama was elected the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, but before his political career began. The book was re-released in 2004 following Senator Obama's widely admired keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention (DNC); the 2004 edition includes a new introduction by Senator Obama as well as his DNC keynote address.

The autobiographical narrative tells the story of the future Senator's life up to his entry in Harvard Law School. He was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Harvard University-educated economist Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., of Kenya, and Ann Dunham of Wichita, Kansas. At the time of Obama's birth, both his parents were students at the East-West Center of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Obama's parents separated when he was two years old and divorced when he was four. Obama formed an image of his absent father from stories told by his mother and her parents.

Ann Dunham Obama then married Lolo Soetoro, an East-West Center student from Indonesia. The family moved to Jakarta. When Obama was ten, he returned to Hawaii under the care of his grandparents (and later his mother) for the better educational opportunities available in Hawaii. He was enrolled in the fifth grade at Punahou School, a private college-preparatory school. Obama was one of three Black students among the majority Asian-American population at that school.In an American school, Obama first became conscious of racism and what it means to be an African-American. At this point, his father came to visit him and his family; it was the last time that Obama would see him before his father's death in a car accident in 1982.

Upon finishing high school, Obama enrolled at Occidental College, where he describes living a "party" lifestyle of drug and alcohol use. He transferred to Columbia College at Columbia University, where he majored in political science.Upon graduation, he worked for a year in business. He then moved to Chicago, where he took up community organizing in the Altgeld Gardens housing project on the city's 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. It was during his time spent here that Obama joined Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ.
In the book, Obama recalls a sermon by pastor Jeremiah Wright called "The Audacity to Hope," from which Obama would take the title of his second book.Obama quotes Wright, describing the world as one "where white folks’ greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere … That’s the world, On which hope sits!"

Before attending Harvard Law School, Obama decided to visit relatives in Kenya. He uses part of his experience there as the setting for the book's final, emotional scene.

As well as relating the story of Obama's life, the book includes a good deal of reflection on his own personal experiences with race and race relations in the United States.(wikipedia)

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