Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
By Barack Obama
Publication Year: 1995
Type: Non-fiction
Genre: memoir, politics
Read on 2018-08-16
View additional specs on this book in Muhan’s 2018 Reading Survey ➞
★★★☆☆
So I keep telling people about this book where young, pre-president but also pre-senator Obama recounts his own AAVE dialogue and talks about smoking weed (and definitely implies he was a pothead). But I mean the real draw of this book is 1) escapism into the comparative orgasmic fantasia that is the Obama administration and by extension Obama’s very being on this earth, and 2) to have said imagined enlightened being explain to me his experience into adulthood (I think he was in his late-20s writing this) with multi-hyphenate racial identity, diasporic ties, and parental expectations.
The book was light on the latter but oh man did it deliver on everything else. I’ll be honest I skimmed through big chunks of the Chicago section, but I was so fucking into Barry’s “homecoming” to Kenya (a type of pilgrimage I feel myself barreling towards as I stumble into my twenties), and I have become the biggest fan of his sister, Auma Obama. I need an Auma in my life, a multi-lingual goddess-guardian-peer to guide me through my own diasporic/familial/identity journey.
Anyways I’m so happy this book exists, that we got Barry-before-Barack as told in his own words (and oh there were so many words). I love that he’s rambly, spends way too long writing rather uncharismatically about actually important issues and micro-histories in Chicago, and lets just mention the pot thing one more time I still can’t get over that like he probably got grilled on it every time he got higher clearance in government or whatever how boss is that
