The Dream of My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995) is a memoir by Barack Obama, who was elected President of the United States in 2008. It explores the events of the beginning of the year, to law school in 1988. Obama published his memoir in July 1995, when he began his political campaign for the Illinois Senate. He was elected the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review in 1990. According to The New York Times, Obama copied the Dreams from My Father on novel Ralph Ellison Invisible Man .
After Obama won a major Democratic Senate victory in Illinois in 2004, the book was reissued that year. He gave a keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention (DNC) and won the Illinois Senate seat in the fall. Obama launched his presidential campaign three years later. The 2004 edition includes a new introduction by Obama and its core DNC address.
Video Dreams from My Father
Narration
Obama told his life until his enrollment at Harvard Law School. He was born in 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Barack Obama, Sr., Kenya, and Ann Dunham from Wichita, Kansas, who met as a student at the University of Hawaii. Obama's parents split up in 1963 and divorced in 1964, when he was two years old. Obama's father went to Harvard to pursue a Ph.D. in Economics. After that, he returned to Kenya to fulfill his promise to his people.
Obama formed the image of his absent father from stories told by his mother and his parents. He saw his father once again, in 1971, when Obama Sr came to Hawaii for a month's visit. The older Obama, who has remarried, died in a car crash in Kenya in 1982.
After his divorce, Ann Dunham married Lolo Soetoro, a Java surveyor from Indonesia who is a graduate student in Hawaii. The family moved to Jakarta. When Obama was ten years old, he returned to Hawaii under the care of maternal grandparents (and later his mother) for better educational opportunities available there. She was enrolled in fifth grade at Punahou School, a private school prep school, where she was one of six black students. Obama attended Punahou School from grade 5 to graduation from grade 12, in 1979. Obama wrote: "For my grandparents, my admission to the Punahou Academy marks the beginning of something great, an increase in the status of a family they suffered greatly, everyone knows. "There, he meets Ray (Keith Kakugawa), who is two years older and also multi-racial. He introduced Obama to the African-American community.
After finishing high school, Obama moved to Los Angeles to study at Occidental College. He explained that he has undergone a "party" lifestyle of drug and alcohol use. After two years at Occidental, he moved to Columbia College at Columbia University, in New York City, where he majored in Political Science.
After graduation, Obama worked for a year in business. He moved to Chicago, where he worked for a nonprofit organization as a community organizer at the Altgeld Gardens residential project on the southern side of the blackest city. Obama recounted the difficulty of experience, as his program faced opposition from deep-rooted community leaders and apathy on the part of a well-established bureaucracy. During this period, Obama first visited the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, which became the center of his spiritual life. Before studying at Harvard Law School, Obama decided to visit relatives in Kenya. He tells part of this experience at the end, the emotional third of the book. Obama uses his memoirs to reflect on his personal experiences with race and race relations in the United States.
Maps Dreams from My Father
Book cover
Photos in the photo left on the cover: Habiba Akumu Hussein and Barack Obama, Sr. (Obama's father's grandmother and father as sons, respectively). Photos in the photo to the right on the cover: Stanley Dunham and Ann Dunham (Obama's maternal grandfather and his mother as young girls).
People in the book
With the exception of family members and a handful of public figures, Barack Obama said in a 2004 introduction that he had changed the names of others to protect their privacy. He also created composite characters to speed up the narrative flow. Some of his acquaintances have recognized themselves and acknowledged their names. Various researchers have suggested the names of other characters in this book:
Reception
In discussing Dreams from My Father, Toni Morrison, a Nobel Laureate novelist, has called Obama "a writer I really appreciate" and the book "is quite wonderful." He praised
"His ability to reflect on the tremendous range of experiences he already possessed, some familiar and some not, and really pondered that the way he did it, and to organize scenes in narrative structures, dialogues, conversations - all these things that are not often you see, obviously, in the biography of a regular political memoir... It's unique.It's hers.
In an interview for The Daily Beast, author Philip Roth said he had read Dreams from My Father with great interest, and commented that he had found it "finished and very persuasive and easy to remember. "
The book "is probably the best written memoir ever made by an American politician," wrote Time Kumit columnist Joe Klein. In 2008, Rob Woodard wrote that Dreams from My Father is the most honest, bold and ambitious volume released by a major US politician in 50 last year. "Michiko Kakutani, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for The New York Times, described it as" the most moving, lyrical, and explicit autobiography written by the future president. "
The audiobook edition earned Obama Grammy Award for Best Words Album Delivered in 2006. Five days before being sworn in as President in 2009, Obama earned $ 500,000 in cash for a short version of Dreams from my Dad for middle-aged children school-age children.
Time magazine Top 100 list
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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