Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.

• Author: Rogers, C.D.
• Position: Book Review

Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama

When Barack Obama graduated from Harvard Law School, magna cum laude and first African-American to be editor of its Law Review, he held the Random House's contract for his memoir: published in 1995 titled Dreams From My Father. When he won the Democratic nomination for U.S. senator from Illinois, he wrote the preface to the 2004 paperback edition. After a decade, he admits, "I've pulled out a copy and read a few chapters.... I confess to wincing every so often at a poorly chosen word, a mangled sentence, an expression of emotion that seems indulgent or overly practiced. I have the urge to cut the book by fifty pages or so, possessed as I am with a keener appreciation for brevity."

Obama's individual writing voice rises as strong as the search of a man for his identity, his priorities, his understanding as a civil rights lawyer of change, and the reconciliations with his authentic self.

Above all, he knows how to tell a story. Like Gerry Spence and John Grisham, he uses the narrative's value in both persuasion and credibility. The narrative structure of Obama's book traces his origins, his experiences from Kansas to Hawaii to Indonesia, Kenya, and from Boston to Chicago. The first narrative in chapter one concerns man's greatest trauma (according to Freud): the death of his Kenyan father. Obama, a student at Columbia University, received a call from his aunt in Nairobi: "Barry, your father is dead. He is killed in a car accident.... Can you hear me?" The last narrative concerns Obama's 2004 keynote address to the Democratic National Convention: "On behalf of the great state of Illinois, crossroads of a nation, Land of Lincoln...."

Second, Obama creates images, many claim the heart of good writing. He makes us see Sadie, a mother and activist helping to clean the Chicago--HUD--housing development of its asbestos. "Ain't nothing gonna change, Mr. Obama," she said. "We just gonna concentrate on saving our money so we can move outta here as fast as we can.'" He uses colors, numbers, names, and vivid verbs as he "dropped to the ground and swept my hand across the smooth yellow tile" of his father's marker. He makes us cry as he sits between the graves of his grandfather and father in Kenya. Crying...