Dreams from My Father

I just finished Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama. I was traveling last week, and I forgot the book that would not be finished. So I read this instead.

Having decided that I was ready to begin taking my first baby steps towards re-joining the national political debate, it seemed like a good idea to start with an eye towards the future. Senator Obama was a highlight of the ‘04 Democratic Convention, and he appears to be a rising star of the party. So I decided to find out more about him by picking up his book.

I was surprised to find out that Sen. Obama wrote this book over 10 years ago, well before his rise on the national political scene. As part of this book deal, he was asked to take a year off after graduation from law school to write about his life and his experiences that led to his becoming the first black editor for the Harvard Law Review. The Senator notes in his new introduction to the book that there are certainly parts of the book that he might consider impolitic. He might be thinking of the part where he acknowledges that as a teen looking for a high, he and his friends would do blow when we could afford it. Ooops.

There are no red state/blue state diatribes. There are no Democrats are better than Republicans essays. There are no lengthy descriptions about why Barack’s tiger style Christianity will defeat W’s dragon style church going. Also: there’s no bragging in this book about what a great man the author is. It’s just the story of one man’s life, warts and all.

The Senator has certainly had an interesting life. His mother, a white woman from Kansas, and his father, a black man from Kenya, met at the University of Hawaii, where he was born. He lived in Indonesia for a time when his mother re-married, returned to Hawaii for school, and went to college at Occidental & Columbia. He then gave up a nice paying finance bob in NYC to move to Chicago to become a community organizer. What that meant in basic terms is that he went to the scariest projects in Chicago’s south side and got involved in peoples’ lives. Later he goes to Kenya to re-establish ties with his father’s family, who were largely unknown to him. The part about going to Harvard is a few pages, and being editor of the Law Review there is not even mentioned in the original text.

The book talks a great deal about racial identity. The idea of having a foot in both the black world and the white world, while not necessarily belonging to either, is a large theme is this book. Having a foot in modern America as well as tribal Africa is also discussed. Growing up without a father present also had a large impact on Sen. Obama. Sen. Obama spends a lot more time trying to figure the complexity of his identity and his purpose in the world than most of us. And with good results.

I am waiting for the next book from Sen. Obama. Hopefully it will contain a lengthy discussion of his race against Alan Keyes, perhaps the best example of what can happen when a campaign based upon actual character and ideals comes up against empty “values” rhetoric. That is a story that I would love to hear to reinforce my general, if sometimes misplaced, faith in the voters of this country. Overall, I would heartily recommend this book to anyone left of Attila the Hun that would like to learn more about someone who figures to play a role in national politics for many years to come (he’s only six years older than I am).

Perhaps I also read this book out of envy. The Chicagoland area has a legitimate warrior for justice and equality. Harumph. My senator won on a campaign whose cornerstone was questioning the patriotism of a man who lost three limbs fighting in Vietnam. Seriously. That he won a public office at all, much less a seat in the U.S. Senate, speaks more to the detriment of the voters in my environs than to the character of the victor. (I can’t believe I made it through this paragraph without using the phrase “douche bag”)