Our Experiences And Our Character: September 2024 Book Recommendation

When I was in middle school, my dad bought me a book and highly implored me to read said book and summarize it to him once I was done. It was an odd and short phase of my life, where I would recap what I have read to him in the living room, his reasoning? He said that the book contained usefull life lessons worth reading, and that he was too busy to read and so I should read it on his behalf. It the time, reading that book felt like a chore, and I only understood the superficial and unimportant parts of the books, which added to my initial disinterest of that book. Fast-forward nine years later, and my eyes had wondered to this book again, that book was "Dreams From My Father", by Barack Obama. In our current, politically polarized time, when memoirs written by politicians are now regaining interest, I decided to look back at the first one I've ever read. 

For a little bit of context, "Dreams From My Father" was published in 1995, two years before Barack Obama was elected as Illinois State Senator in 1997, (not US Senator from Illonois, that would be in 2005). This is the Barack Obama that was not known on a national level, the Obama ten years before his 2004 DNC keynote address, and most importantly, the Obama that was not yet President of the United States. Just already, I could find thematic parallels between this book and "Hillbilly Elegy" by J.D. Vance, who also wrote his book before his foray into politics. Whereas "Hillbilly Elegy" tackles the issue of white poverty in America from an Appalachian perspective, "Dreams From My Father" discusses the reality of the complexity of manhood, fatherhood and race relations in our country. 

Despite being framed as a memoir, multple scholars such as pullitzer prize winners, David Garrow, and David Remnick have seperately stated that "Dreams From My Father" would be more akin to historical fiction than an actual biography, and contains a confusing mixture of actual facts, innacuracies and exagerations. Obama has fully acknowledges these concerns in this book too, listing the many flaws that autobiographies tend to pose. 

Now, as for the book itself, I hate doing summaries for biographies of people because you could probably search it on the internet instead, but I'm going to anyways. The book is the most important piece of work needed to understand the lore of Barack Obama and the experiences he went through has definitely shaped his character, ambitions, and of course, the man he is today. The memoir traces his experiences growing up in Hawaii and Indonesia, both ethnically diverse regions of the world, him dealing with the complexities of being biracial, and the influence of his absent Kenyan father, Barack Obama Sr, who, if you guessed correctly, is the "father" in the title. The second half of the book centers around Obama's adulthood, when he delves into his political awakening through Columbia and Harvard law, his time as a community organizer in Chicago, and his emotional journey to Kenya to connect with his father's legacy. This was also the book which contained the still-controversial snippet where Obama discusses his time smoking marijuana, and being part of the "Choom Gang". 

Barack Obama and his presidency was one of the most consequential eight years of 21st century America so far, including a foreign policy pivot to Asia, the cultural shift surrounding social progress, and planting the seeds of poltical polarization in this country, these three are the ones that I know from the top of my head, but there are many, many more to list. I was too young to personally remember Obama's presidency, even more so regarding the man himself. "Dreams From My Father" has been able to inform me of the latter, and hopefully I can have a fully informed opinion on Barack Obama once I read his other memoir, "A Promised Land", which details his presidency, and maybe also read his other, other memoir "The Audacity of Hope". 

Overall, I think US Presidents are a great way to be introduced to memoirs as a genre. As for this very book by Barack Obama, I find it to be very insightful and eye-opening to the reality of race in our country, but it feels like a first book in a trilogy of memoirs (maybe because it is). I try my best to seperate the politics of Obama himself when focusing on this book, and I intend to do the same for future books by political figures. In the end, I give this book a 4, a great memoir, and a great introduction to the ideas of intersectionality, despite containing some elements of cliche and other common biographical pitfalls.