{"id":143,"date":"2008-06-11T22:53:33","date_gmt":"2008-06-12T02:53:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/2008\/06\/11\/review-of-dreams-from-my-father-by-barack-obama\/"},"modified":"2008-10-13T00:03:45","modified_gmt":"2008-10-13T04:03:45","slug":"review-of-dreams-from-my-father-by-barack-obama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/?p=143","title":{"rendered":"Review of Dreams from My Father, by Barack Obama"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"dreams_from_my_father.jpg\"<\/em><\/p>\n

Dreams from My Father:\u00a0 A Story of Race and Inheritance, <\/em><\/p>\n

by Barack Obama<\/p>\n

Crown Publishers, New York, 2004.\u00a0 First published in 1995.\u00a0 442 pages.<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.crownpublishing.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n

My Auntie Sue wanted me to read this book so much, she sent me a copy.\u00a0 Thank you, Auntie Sue!<\/p>\n

And I admit, it was down low in my pile of books to read for quite awhile.\u00a0 Once I did finally open it up and look inside, I was quickly hooked.\u00a0 Whatever else you might say about Barack Obama, he does have a way with words.<\/p>\n

This book was written before Senator Obama\u00a0started his political career, so it’s not a story about politics.\u00a0 Instead, it’s a story of growing up as someone who felt like an outsider.\u00a0 He was naturally forced to think deeply about questions of race and questions of belonging.<\/p>\n

Barack Obama was brought up by his white mother and her parents, in Hawaii.\u00a0 His father was an international student from Kenya.\u00a0\u00a0The father\u00a0went to study at Harvard, but didn’t have the money to bring his family with him, and ended up going back to Kenya on his own.<\/p>\n

Later, Barack’s mother married an Indonesian, so he grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia, and went to college in California.<\/p>\n

This book covers those growing up years, his years working as a community organizer in Chicago, and then a trip to Kenya where he met family members on his father’s side and learned about the father he only met when he was ten years old.<\/p>\n

As a child growing up in a white family with brothers and sisters from Africa, as an American who spent several formative years living in Indonesia, Barack Obama is in a unique position to reflect on race in America, on community and belonging, as well as on attitudes about poverty that have similarities worldwide.<\/p>\n

This is fascinating and thought-provoking reading.\u00a0 Now I will try to get my hands on his later book, The Audacity of Hope.<\/em><\/p>\n

Buy from Amazon.com<\/a><\/p>\n

Find this review on the main site at:<\/p>\n

www.sonderbooks.com\/Nonfiction\/dreams_from_my_father.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dreams from My Father:\u00a0 A Story of Race and Inheritance, by Barack Obama Crown Publishers, New York, 2004.\u00a0 First published in 1995.\u00a0 442 pages. http:\/\/www.crownpublishing.com\/ My Auntie Sue wanted me to read this book so much, she sent me a copy.\u00a0 Thank you, Auntie Sue! And I admit, it was down low in my pile […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,2,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-issues","category-nonfiction-review","category-true-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=143"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}