RollnSmoke Reviews: DREAMS FROM MY FATHER

DREAMS FROM MY FATHER by Barack Obama (Three Rivers, 2004). Obama’s memoir was originally published in 1995 before Obama was a father, a senator or the 44th President of the United States. A publishing advance came as a result of his election as the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, and the subsequent memoir was written in “the belief that the story of [his] family, and [his] efforts to understand that story, might speak in some way to the fissures of race that have characterized the American experience.” Here Obama is a true story-teller – his memoir is paced like a novel -- so that the tricky business of growing up both black and white as a boy in Indonesia and Hawaii, during his college years at Occidental and throughout his early professional life as a community organizer in Chicago comes alive, and the reader is mesmerized. Intriguing details about his life pepper the story; for example, his nickname among family was “Barry,” and his Kenyan father was not only the first African to graduate form the University of Hawaii but was also granted a scholarship and earned a PhD from Harvard. While Obama doesn’t necessarily emerge as likable – in fact he is often tense, doubtful and defensive -- his writing is true, his tone is unpretentious and his career goals are fresh and un-calculated as he addresses the universal identity question: Where do I belong? 9.5/10