Review: Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama

I would like to dedicate this post to United Airlines, for my seven hour layover in Denver, which enabled me to finish reading this book, and drove me to starting another really promising one.

For those who may have suspected that I am an Obama fan, it's true, and this book hasn't made me any less of one. More than ever, Obama seems like the Anti-Bush to me: eloquent where Bush is incoherent, analytical where Bush thoughtless, cool where Bush is rash, compassionate where Bush is mean - and, most importantly, penetrating where Bush is dense. Where Bush is utterly unable to express himself except in the most banal and trite sloganeering, Obama reveals a nuanced understanding of how the world works.

Obama's first book, written before his political career, is personal, revealing, and gripping. The image revealed is more complex and interesting than the plaster saint we see in the campaign literature. It is also a bit less polished than Audacity of Hope, but well-written nonetheless. Autobiography is always written from a highly biased point of view, but Obama is not reluctant to be self-critical.

His rather odd family circumstances left him more than a little confused about his identity. Raised almost entirely by his (white) mother and her parents he often felt marooned in a cultural milieu that he was part of but couldn't fully belong to. The father he couldn't remember and only saw once after his infancy loomed as a mythic figure celebrated in occasional larger-than-life anecdotes of his mother and grandparents.

An able student driven relentlessly by his mother, he managed to get admitted to Hawaii's elite prep school, thanks to a bit of affirmative action: his (white) grandfather had a friend on the board. Once again he felt isolated among his mostly wealthy and almost entirely white classmates. This started him on a long quest for his identity as a black man.

Despite the fact that both of his parents ultimately earned PhDs, he was hardly a child of the academy - when his father went off to Harvard to study, he never came back, and his mother's education came later.

His father, it seems, was idealistic, eloquent, brilliant and complicated. He wasn't much of a father to his eight children by four wives, and his idealism brought his downfall to tribal politics.

Steve Sailer excerpts much of the description of one half-brother here. I would recommend ignoring Steve's obtuse commentary, but the passage gives a real flavor of Obama's thought.

"'So, Mark,' I said, turning to my brother, 'I hear you're at Berkeley.'

"'Stanford,' he corrected. His voice was deep, his accent perfectly American. 'I'm in my last year of the physics program there.'"


They meet once more, for lunch:


"I asked him how it felt being back for the summer.

"'Fine,' he said. 'It's nice to see my mom and dad, of course. … As for the rest of Kenya, I don't feel much of an attachment. Just another poor African country.'

"'You don't ever think about settling here?'

"Mark took a sip from his Coke. 'No,' he said. 'I mean, there's not much work for a physicist, is there, in a country where the average person doesn't have a telephone.'

"I should have stopped then, but something -- the certainty in this brother's voice, maybe, or our rough resemblance, like looking into a foggy mirror -- made me want to push harder. I asked, "Don't you ever feel like you might be losing something?'

"Mark put down his knife and fork, and for the first time that afternoon his eyes looked straight into mine.

"'I understand what you're getting at,' he said flatly. 'You think that somehow I'm cut off from my roots, that sort of thing.' He wiped his mouth and dropped the napkin onto his plate. 'Well, you're right. At a certain point, I made a decision not think about who my real father was. He was dead to me even when he was still alive. I knew that he was a drunk and showed no concern for his wife or children. That was enough.'

But read the rest, in the book. Or, if you must, the rest of that passage at the link.

This article, by Scott Fornek, reviews a bit of what is known about Obama's very extended family.

The book leaves plenty of questions. Why does Obama, after graduating from a prestigious college and experimenting with the corporate life, go to work in decaying Chicago neighborhoods as a barely paid community organizer? Other people ask him that question (in the book) and he doesn't have a good answer for them or us. It's a peculiar way for an ambitious talent to start. My own theory is that it represented a merger between his search for a black identity and his mother's lifelong passionate idealism - an idealism he describes as naive but just as clearly admires.

I recommend the book strongly both to those who want some insight into whom our next President is and why he ought to be.