Dreams From My Father
The Audacity of Hope

   Author: Barack Obama

reviewed by Theresa Welsh

Who is Barack Obama?
  Read His Books and Find out

Dreams From My Father

Barack Obama, a candidate for President of the United States, is also a best-selling author. I like the idea of electing a man who reads books, and who writes books as good as these.

Dreams From My Father is a candid story of Obama's childhood with an absent father, and his attempt, as a young man, to discover the father from Kenya he never knew.

A Mythical Father, a Real Mother
While he writes about the myth he created for himself about his father being a warrior and prince of a far-away place, a story he invented to replace the actual experience of having a father, and a way to deflect the taunts of the other kids who were not fatherless, Obama is steadfast in his love for his mother and his grandparents, whose presence was actual and whose sacrifice was real. His story reflects the times when he was growing up in Hawaii, with a grandmother ("Toot") who works as an underappreciated and underpaid bank officer, working harder than the men but not getting the promotions, and a grandfather, a World war II veteran, struggling to make a living as a salesman. His mother had met and married the senior Barack Obama when he was a student in Hawaii, and suffered as he left her to go to Harvard and never came back. She married again, this time to an Indonesian student. When they went to live in his country, she took her son Barack with her to Jakarta.

Obama writes fondly of his years in Indonesia and his affection for his step-father, Lolo, but his mother, wanting her son to have the best education and disdaining the corruption that was everywhere in Indonesia, sends him back to her parents in Hawaii where, through the intervention of Gramps, he is enrolled in the prestigious Punahou school. And here he begins to feel like the outsider. He is the skinny kid with the funny name, and he is racially different, but of course, this is Hawaii, a place with lots of racial mixing. Another more painful test comes when the absent father sends word that he is coming for a visit. Further, his father will visit the school and give a talk about his native land. Obama is full of worry and misery at the prospect, thinking it might be an experience of total humiliation in front of his classmates. He tells us about meeting the black man who is his father and the discovery of a man of some charm and talent that his school mates declare to be "cool." His father teaches him to dance, then disappears from his life.

His life with the grandparents who made him a priority in their lives defined a happy childhood. While the racial difference did not infect their family life, at times it still intruded. He relates the story of a man hassling his grandmother as she waited for a bus, and the shock he felt when Gramps tells him that the man who frightened Toot was black. This bothered Gramps, but he was right away sorry he had told his grandson. Full of contradictory feelings about his own racial identity, Obama goes to see an old black poet who Gramps liked to hang out with. The man explained (in his own poetic way) that a white man can be comfortable with a black man, come over and fall asleep in his house and be buddies, but, said the old black poet, the white man can never understand what it really feels like to be black, and that "your grandma's right to be scared... she understands that black people have a reason to hate." The chapter concludes with the words "and I knew for the first time that I was utterly alone."

Beginning Professional Life
As Obama goes off to college and begins a professional life, he thinks about the father he had met only once, and is shocked to receive a phone call one day from an aunt he does not know who informs him that his father has died in Kenya. He goes on with his life and we read of Obama's first suit and tie job in New York City (and how he slept in an alley the first night in NYC when the person who promised him a bed for the night was not at home) and his dissatisfaction with the job and his desire to instead work as a community organizer. He sends out resumes, he quits the good job, he goes down to his last dollar before taking a job offered by a scruffy white guy to work in some tough neighborhoods of Chicago.

His experiences with the poor people of Chicago are poignant and related with an honesty and refreshing lack of boasting. No, he didn't wipe out poverty and racism, and some of his efforts fell flat, but he learned a lot about himself as well as what life is like for poor people who feel powerless. And there were some successes.

The Trip to Kenya: Confronting the Myth
It's hard to say whether the first part of the book, with those unusual early experiences, was the best part, or the last part where he takes us along on his trip to Kenya, to try to reclaim the elusive father. We meet an endless parade of people who are related in various ways to Obama and how, in many ways, were not as he thought they'd be, many asking him for money and others taking him to task for sins of the senior Obama. His childish image of the great warrior father suffers a further blow. He travels the country, tracing the path his grandfather Onyango had taken, and learns how this grandfather went from Luo tribesman to doing the white man's work and adopting their ways. When the senior Barack Obama, son of Onyango, returned with his Harvard education, he helped Jomo Kenyatta build a country, but he did not build any wealth for his family. The author tells us of modest houses, shared beds, traveling by rickety bus, and using outhouses. His Kenyan family were living on the edge, without the resources or opportunity that America had given the young Barack.

I loved his account of going on a safari with his sister Auma and his colorful descriptions of the animals he saw up close and personal, roaming freely in the land of his ancestors. Auma did not want to go ("safaris are for the white tourists") and his insistence ("You're letting your prejudices keep you from enjoying your own country").

The last chapters are an abrupt shift. We fast-forward through the rest of Obama's life to the time he wrote the book. It's as if he wanted to tell us more, but ran out of space and just summarized the rest, but we do learn a bit about his meeting Michelle and settling into family life.

Barack Obama finally laid to rest the ghost of his father and found his own authentic self. We are the richer that he chose to share his journey with us in this memorable book.

The Audacity of Hope

The second book, The Audacity of Hope, is more about his plans and ideas, but still manages to be more personal than the usual political book. He tells us what it was like going to work on his first day as a US Senator in the capital, describing the places he went and what he saw. He even tells us about his first meeting with President Bush, who made a point of talking to him during a group session with new members of congress and how the President gave him a bit of advice. Bush told him he had a "bright future" and to watch out for all the people who would be giving him a hard time. "When you get a lot of attention like you've been getting, people start gunnin' for ya," Bush told him.

Obama mentions his excitement at seeing the Lincoln Bedroom for the first time. It is obvious that Washington is filled with echoes of history for him, and the White House ("…a big old house one might imagine could be a bit drafty on a cold winter night") is no ordinary place and he is star-struck by the ghosts of the great Presidents who made historic decisions in these rooms and halls. But he is never unmindful of how the policies of those in power must work for ordinary Americans, not just support the goals of the rich and powerful. The Presidency holds a place of high honor, but the President must do the right thing.

Doing the Right Thing
And he goes on to tell us what he thinks the right thing is. In between the peeks into his personal actions and feelings, we find out what he stands for, what he believes. Each chapter covers a different aspect of his hope for America. He begins with Values. He tells us he does not think Bush and those around him are bad people, but they are not doing the right thing for America. He would like to end partisan bickering and notes that most Washington insiders are trained either as lawyers or political operatives, professions that "tend to place a premium on winning arguments rather than solving problems."

Obama is optimistic that people can come together because he believes we are all becoming more alike, better able to understand each other's hopes and dreams. He does not want Republicans to own the "values" issue. Everyone has values, and Obama's years living in Indonesia and his travels to Kenya made him aware of the freedom and opportunity we have here. We each need to bring some balance to the issues beloved of Liberals and those of Conservatives and make an effort to understand each other.

He writes eloquently and with impressive knowledge about our Constitution. I loved his story about meeting Senator Robert C. Byrd, a much-respected senior statesman and expert on the Constitution and, as Obama describes him, "a living breathing fragment of history." Senator Byrd gives Obama a set of signed books he wrote on the Constitution. Byrd regularly urges all members of Congress to read and understand the document that we live by.

But Obama is less enthusiastic about some of the practices of Congress, especially the filibuster, which, he tells us, choked off every attempt to pass Civil Rights legislation for many years. But, on the other hand, the very threat of a filibuster being used against a nominee for a high court position has meant we've avoided having a Supreme Court packed with ultra conservative judges.

In his chapter on politics, he writes about money, and says most lobbyists don't offer a quid pro quo and most politicians aren't in it for the money. "Money isn't about getting rich. In the Senate at least, most members are already rich. It's about maintaining status and power."

But Obama was not rich when he ran for the Senate and he says there is only one way to get the money to run: "You have to ask rich people for it." He tells us he hated making cold calls and asking for money, and he hated even more enduring people hanging up on him or never responding to his messages. He tells us this experience made him understand how his grandfather must have felt when he had to make cold calls as a salesman, hoping for sales but facing frequent failure. He writes about those "special interest groups" you hear about and says their influence is "not pretty." These groups, he says, are not out to promote the public interest, they aren't "searching for the most thoughtful, well-qualified, or broad-minded candidate to support. Instead, they are focused on a narrow set of concerns - their pensions, their crop support, their cause. Simply put, they have an ax to grind. And they want you, the elected official, to help them grind it."

Obama is impressed with Google, a company he visited, and where he learned about the technology that made this company so successful. He contrasts their success with the tragedy of industrial workers losing jobs. He tells us that we've come to believe so much in the free-market system that we sometimes think it's the natural order of things. But, Obama writes, it is "the result neither of natural law nor of divine providence. Rather it emerged through a painful process of trial and error, a series of difficult choices between efficiency and fairness, stability and change. And although the benefits of our free-market system have mostly derived from the individual efforts of generations of men and women pursuing their own vision of happiness, in each and every period of great economic upheaval and transition, we've depended on government action to open up opportunity…"

His Own Story -- Of Family and Faith
He discusses his own drive to success, Harvard Law School, and paying the bills, writing that it took ten years for he and Michelle to pay off their college debts. Payments on those debts were "considerably more" than their mortgage payments.

Another interesting personal tale is what he has to say about Alan Keyes, the man who ran against him for the US Senate from Illinois. Obama found Alan Keyes very annoying, and his simplistic, conservative, "I am a real Christian and you are not" view of life very very annoying. It was frustrating for Barack to listen to Keyes' diatribes, but Keyes was no real competition in the election which Obama won handily.

His chapter on faith is full of honesty, with no preaching and no doctrinal spin, just simple words about his belief in something beyond himself, something felt more than understood. And it's connected to love for his family and his country. He feels the connection with the infinite when he's with his wife and his two little daughters; he clearly adores all three of the women in his life. (Plus, at the end of this chapter he talks about washing the dishes while his wife puts the girls to bed. I wonder if George Bush ever washed a dish!)

On the subject of race, Obama has a story somewhat different from other Black candidates who grew up in the South, descendants of slaves. Although he embraces his African side, he never backs away from his other side either. He says of his relatives, who come in all colors and ethnicities - there are "some who resemble Margaret Thatcher and others who could pass for Bernie Mac." He says, "I've never had the option of restricting my loyalties on the basis of race, or measuring my worth on the basis of tribe."

He discusses the immigration issue and concludes his chapter with a tale of visiting a place where immigrants were preparing for citizenship, and of a little girl named Cristina asking him for an autograph. He tells us that "Ultimately the danger to our way of life is not that we will be overrun by those who do not look like us or speak our language. The danger will come if we fail to recognize the humanity of Cristina and her family, if we withhold from them the rights and opportunities that we take for granted…"

The book also contains a rare admission from a man that his work and his ambition put an extra strain on his wife, and Obama takes himself to task for not finding ways to give Michelle more support. This is a family with lots of love for one other. Through these two books, you can learn a great deal about the man, the senator from Illinois, who just might be the next President of the United States.