Thursday, August 5, 2004
Barack Obama's Story...From 1995
New Democratic superstar Barack Obama wrote a memoir back in 1995 called "Dreams from My Father : A Story of Race and Inheritance". It's being re-printed now that Obama has hit the national spotlight.
Obviously, I haven't read it, but I venture to say that if it's half as evocative and thoughtful as his keynote speech at the DNC, it should be worth far more than eleven bucks...
From the book's 1995 Amazon description:
Elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama was offered a book contract, but the intellectual journey he planned to recount became instead this poignant, probing memoir of an unusual life. Born in 1961 to a white American woman and a black Kenyan student, Obama was reared in Hawaii by his mother and her parents, his father having left for further study and a return home to Africa. So Obama's not-unhappy youth is nevertheless a lonely voyage to racial identity, tensions in school, struggling with black literature with one month-long visit when he was 10 from his commanding father. After college, Obama became a community organizer in Chicago. He slowly found place and purpose among folks of similar hue but different memory, winning enough small victories to commit himself to the work he's now a civil rights lawyer there. Before going to law school, he finally visited Kenya; with his father dead, he still confronted obligation and loss, and found wellsprings of love and attachment.
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