Books by the U.S. Senator from Illinois
The Audacity of Hope
Dreams From My FatherDreams from My Father by Barack Obama, published in 1995 and again in 2004 by Three Rivers Press, is the 442-page autobiography of the Illinois Senator and 2008 Democratic presidential hopeful. Born in Hawaii to a white woman from Kansas and a Kenyan father, Obama eloquently recounts his emotional and physical journey to understand and embrace his bi-racial heritage. The book chronicles the first four decades of Obama’s life from a child in Hawaii to his first stint in politics as a community organizer in South Chicago and concludes with Obama’s fateful trip to Kenya to connect with his Luo family. —Andrea Glaessner
Dreams From My Father
by Barack Obama
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| From Kansas to Hawaii | Obama's tale of his lineage begins in Kansas: "the dab-smack, landlocked center of the country, a place where decency and endurance and the pioneer spirit were joined at the hip with conformity and suspicion and the potential for unblinking cruelty." (p. 13) A restless American who embraced the open road, Obama's grandfather dragged his wife and daughter from California to Texas before finally deciding on Hawaii "to embark on the final leg of their journey, west, toward the setting sun." (p. 16) |
| Bi-racial Background | As a child, Obama admits he was not fully in touch with his racial identity: "That my father looked nothing like the people around me — that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk — barely registered in my mind." (p. 10) Obama's parents divorced when he was only two years old, and his father returned to Kenya, leaving his son in the care of his mother and grandparents. |
| Life in Indonesia | At age six, Obama and his mother moved to Indonesia to live with Obama's new stepfather, Lolo. Living in post-Sukarno Jakarta, Obama had his first encounters with real poverty and political strife: "The world was violent, I was learning, unpredictable and often cruel." (p. 38) Although his mother inculcated her son with needlepoint virtues, her ideas seemed impractical at the time: "In a land where fatalism remained a necessary tool for enduring hardship...she was a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism." (p. 50) |
| Punahou Prep | In Jakarta, Obama had attended local schools and assimilated quickly into Indonesian culture. But when he returned to Hawaii to attend Punahou prep — "a prestigious prep school, an incubator for island elites" — Obama had a hard time fitting in. (p. 58) Wearing dowdy Indonesian sandals and being one of two black kids in the class, Obama was initially "relegated to the category of misfits." Feeling out of place and alone, Obama took refuge in the "soft, forgiving bosom of America's consumer culture," immersing himself in comic books and television shows and avoiding his peers. (p. 62) |
| Struggling with Race | Obama stayed at Punahou through high school and eventually began making friends with the few African American students who had gravitated to Punahou over the years. Despite having found a greater sense of belonging, Obama began in those years to battle with himself and his race: "I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant." (p. 76) |
| Drugs and Alcohol | In his signature style of honesty bordering on self-deprecation, Obama candidly admits to drug and alcohol use in his younger years. Calling himself a "pothead" heading towards "the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man," Obama confesses to getting high in order to "push questions of who I was out of my mind." (p. 93) He cites using marijuana and cocaine, but he explicitly assures his readers that he did not use crack.(p. 93) |
| College Days | Testing everything from pot to Marxism to black power while at Occidental College in L.A., Obama was a regular rebel, alienated from the bourgeoisie, black and politically active. Eager to stake a role in the black community, Obama made sure to choose his friends and groups carefully, despite his interest in a wide variety of student organizations: "It remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names." (p. 100, 101) |
| Transfer to Columbia U | With two years of college left and plagued with uncertainty about his future, Obama decided to take advantage of the transfer program between Occidental and Columbia University. His decision was influenced by a desire to anchor his African heritage in a place — something he was unable to do growing up in Hawaii: "What I needed was a community, I realized, a community that cut deeper than the common despair that black friends and I shared when reading the latest crime statistics." (p. 115) |
| Father's Death | Obama's relationship with his father consisted of one Christmas visit in elementary school, letters written sporadically over the years, and stories told by those who knew him: "At the time of his death, my father remained more of a myth to me, both more and less than a man." (p. 5) When he died suddenly in a car crash in 1982, Obama found it difficult to mourn for a father he never really knew: "...I felt no pain, only the vague sense of an opportunity lost, and I saw no reason to pretend otherwise. My plans to travel to Kenya were placed on indefinite hold." (p. 128) |
| Move to Chicago | A year after his father's death, Obama decided to quit his office job as a financial officer in Manhattan and become a community organizer. In hindsight, Obama realized that his decision to abandon his career path in finance to move to Chicago "was part of that larger narrative, starting with my father and his father before him, my mother and her parents, my memories of Indonesia with its beggars and farmers...my move to New York; my father's death." (p. 133) |
| Organizing the South Side | Throughout the six chapters Obama dedicates to discussing his life in South Chicago as a community organizer, moments of victory are few. Nonetheless, the experience changed the young Obama, helping him find that place to anchor his race, a faith to lean on, and offering him the experience needed for a future career in politics and public service. |
| Acceptance to Harvard Law | After five years organizing communities in the projects of South Chicago, Obama decided to pursue law school: "...I had gone over my decision at least a hundred times. I needed a break, that was for sure. I wanted to go to Kenya...And I had things to learn in law school, things that would help me bring about real change...knowledge that would have compromised me before coming to Chicago but that I could now bring back to where it was needed...bring it back like Promethean fire." (p. 276) |
| Religion | Raised in a household skeptical of organized religion, it was not until Obama attended a Trinity United Church of Christ service while working as an organizer in South Chicago that he began to feel a sense of belonging and a desire for faith: "...If a part of me continued to feel that this Sunday communion sometimes simplified our condition, that it could sometimes disguise or suppress the very real conflicts among us and would fulfill its promise only through action, I also felt for the first time how that spirit carried within it, nascent, incomplete, the possibility of moving beyond our narrow dreams." (p. 294) |
| Kenya | Obama finally embarked on a journey to Kenya after reuniting with two of his Kenyan half-siblings, Auma and Roy, in the States. Going to Kenya, meeting his family for the first time, and finally learning about the father he had never truly known, Obama was finally able to connect with that other half of his heritage that was hitherto a giant mystery and a source of angst and confusion. |
| Marriage | Obama briefly touches on his marriage to his wife, Michelle, in the epilogue, admitting her influence on refining his character: "I think I've learned to be more patient these past few years, with others as well as myself. If so, it's one of the several improvements in my character that I attribute to my wife, Michelle." (p. 439) |
| In Conclusion | Consistent with his style as a politician, Obama concludes the book with his own honest, thought-provoking, and hopeful view of America. Noting that a lifetime of work remains just to crack the surface of this country's struggles with race, poverty, morality, and justice, Obama is still optimistic: "We hold these truths to be self evident. In those words...I hear all of these voices clamoring for recognition, all of them asking the same questions...And yet, in the conversation itself, in the joining of voices, I find myself modestly encouraged, believing that so long as the questions are still being asked, what binds us together might somehow, ultimately, prevail." (p. 438) |
