Dreams from my Father

Barack Obama’s autobiography Dreams from my Father was first published in 1995 and reissued in 2004 to capitalise on Obama’s increasingly high profile, but it’s a book that would still be worth reading if he were toiling in obscurity for life. This is because, whatever else he does or doesn’t achieve in future, Obama can write, and he has a story to tell.

The first paragraph describes where he was living when he heard his father had died:

‘The apartment was small, with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn’t work, so that visitors had to call ahead from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle.’

It sets the scene perfectly for an emotional and riveting memoir. The childhood in Hawaii, brought up by his white mother and grandparents after his Kenyan father went to Harvard to do a PhD and never came back. Then to Indonesia with his mother and a benevolent stepfather; return to Hawaii to live with his grandparents and get an education, joined again by his mother later when that marriage ended; a vibrant and fascinating account of community organising in Chicago; and finally a journey to Kenya after his father’s death, to meet to his extended family and find out more about his African heritage.

I’m sure many readers will enjoy the Kenyan section the most. Obama understands the complexity and richness of family and neighbourhood connections and how they form the bedrock of most people’s lives. He also understands poverty, and the dilemmas of identity in the modern world where attachments to more than one country are increasingly common.

But my favourite chapters were the Chicago years. The account of community organising in a housing project, in a disadvantaged area within a racially divided city, helps us to understand why Obama went into politics. He describes the soul-destroying attempts to find common issues, to mobilise impoverished people, to lobby the Chicago Housing Authority and local politicians. The limitations of that job drove him to Law School and subsequently into the Illinois Senate. It now looks as if he’ll end up in the White House, with a background unlike any previous president – and I’m not just talking about race.