A review by caoilinreads
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama
4.0
"Strange how a single conversation can change you. Or maybe it only feels that way in retrospect."
Obama's intelligence, introspection, and personal struggle with his identity - as the child of an absent Kenyan father and a white American mother in America, a country that continues to struggle with race - are crisply interpreted in this book.
I loved the beginning as he delves into his family history and childhood and towards the end as he learns to make peace with his Kenyan roots and his lost father. The middle felt less compelling to me, but I still enjoyed it just for his writing: "And so he straddles two worlds, uncertain of each, always off balance." This book is a delicate balancing act of question and answer, facts and emotion, which sometimes falls too much towards the factual or the literal but which leaves you feeling privy to something intimate yet intellectual; a struggle of identity and a search for an understanding of himself, his roots, and the world.
Obama's intelligence, introspection, and personal struggle with his identity - as the child of an absent Kenyan father and a white American mother in America, a country that continues to struggle with race - are crisply interpreted in this book.
I loved the beginning as he delves into his family history and childhood and towards the end as he learns to make peace with his Kenyan roots and his lost father. The middle felt less compelling to me, but I still enjoyed it just for his writing: "And so he straddles two worlds, uncertain of each, always off balance." This book is a delicate balancing act of question and answer, facts and emotion, which sometimes falls too much towards the factual or the literal but which leaves you feeling privy to something intimate yet intellectual; a struggle of identity and a search for an understanding of himself, his roots, and the world.