Book Review: Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama

Synopsis:

Nine years before the Senate campaign that 

made him one of the most influential and compelling voices in American politics, Barack Obama published this lyrical, unsentimental, and powerfully affecting memoir, which became a #1 New York Times bestseller when it was reissued in 2004. Dreams from My Father tells the story of Obama’s struggle to understand the forces that shaped him as the son of a black African father and white American mother—a struggle that takes him from the American heartland to the ancestral home of his great-aunt in the tiny African village of Alego.  Barack discovers that he is inescapably bound to brothers and sisters living an ocean away—and that by embracing their common struggles he can finally reconcile his divided inheritance. A searching meditation on the meaning of identity in America, Dreams from My Father might be the most revealing portrait we have of a major American leader—a man who is playing, and will play, an increasingly prominent role in healing a fractious and fragmented nation.

My Review: 

    I have become really fond of this book. This book is an open gate towards stories of history, a beautiful yet sad portrait of Africa, true images of a real world. The reason why I wanted to read this book in the first place was that I wanted to know more about the past of the man who was once the President of America, the first African American to be elected as the president of the United States, a country where racism against black people was bluntly expressed in this book. 

    This book was written way before Obama became a president. This book was truly inspiring to me in many aspects and forms. It was inspiring in the sense that in a way it was a portraying of Obama's journey of self-discovery, a reflection of his past, his childhood, his adolescence, turning points in his life, his family's history, his life, but it was also a picture of the truth, of what was really going on in places he was in, in the black communities in Chicago, America, his life in Hawaii, in Indonesia, in Kenya... Therefore, it not only showed us what and who has affected Obama to become the person he became but it outgrew that to show us who is Barack Obama and why is he the he was. 

    It gave me a greater understanding of a world, of stories, of realities I wasn't aware of. It also contained some great beautiful stories from the past, history of societies. I highly recommend it. And if he was to write another book like many years later, I definitely would read it. You could see that he was a genuine person, not just as a person but also genuine in his feelings and sentiment. 

   The book's language was relatively modest and simple, however, if definitely wasn't a light read, it was a heavy book, that towards the middle, I was struggling to finish it but I am so happy I did. 

   However, what I didn't appreciate about this book was that it needed concentration, it was heavy, dead serious book where you'd need to concentrate to get absorb it all in which didn't go well with the fact that I usually read before going to bed, so I'd say that to get the full hang of the more political details of this book, I would need to read again. Towards the middle of the book, it contained too many details of a timing of Barack Obama's life that it was just hard to keep up, like to the point you'd get bored but don't yet give up on the book because after that small part, it's about to get so much better.

   Overall, I really enjoyed this and would recommend it to anybody who is interested in reading about an inspiring journey of a successful person and the 44th President of the United States.

Rating: 4/5 

Mariam