After seeing Barack Obama’s keynote address to the 2004 Democratic National convention…and following the increasing speculation about the possibility that he might run for President, I expected a great deal from his books.
Dreams from my Father is a well-written, interesting account of his coming to terms with his heritage as the son of a white Kansas woman and absentee Nigerian economist father. However, I found myself skimming through the last half of the book–it just wasn’t that compelling for me. Obama clearly has thought about himself a great deal–I can certainly relate to that–but it doesn’t necessarily make the most interesting reading. I would be more interested in the details of his experiences organizing in Chicago or how he made the leap into law school. His stories of organizing provide some good insight into what it is like to work with poor people to help them achieve better conditions, but it seems too little. Clearly Obama has done so much more than he had time to talk about in the book–maybe some of that will be covered in The Audacity of Hope…which I will read later this year.
But all in all, I did not feel I gained anything from reading this book. It is a personal journal, and the story does help illustrate and educate me as a white man, about the issues that confront African Americans and other minorities It impresses me that Barack is so intelligent. But I assume he’s not the only one! It is perhaps an indication of how far we have come in society that such an articulate, thoughtful writing is not considered unusual for the fact that it came from a black writer.
Obama has charisma and he is certainly a very intelligent person. But, at least from this book, I did not get the sense of “vision” that I am looking for from a potential President. Again…maybe that’s not the purpose of this book.