The writing is thoughtful and interesting, and the subject matter unique. The book follows Barack Obama as he grows up and defines himself and his view of the world, as he finds the community that he wants to count himself a member of. In the end that "community" is really the community of humanity, but this book takes you on Barack's journey.

The author examines his heritage of white, midwesterners on his mother's side and later in the book explores the world of his father, a Kenya of the Luo tribe who came to the U.S. to study. Three parts of the book I found especially well done. First, the evocation of what it was like to be in Barack's head as a young black man with few black role models in his life and the difficult philosophical (internal) conversation of the African-American community defining itself in white America. Second, his work as a community organizer in Chicago really dealt well with the complex problems of declining inner cities. Third, the idealization of his absent father by both himself and his mother and the gradual discovery of the real character of his father and grandfather.

Overall, this book was about his struggle to be true to himself and to figure out what that meant.


Definitely shows his hatred of white people   April 4, 2008
 106 out of 232 found this review helpful

I read this book expecting to find the lessons that Obama learned from his father and how they shaped him as a man. Instead I came away with his intense feeling of hatred for whites. I see now why this man, who is running for President, stayed in his church for so long, soaking up the hateful vitriol being spewed from the pulpit. He totally agrees with it!


Not what I expected...   August 22, 2005
 102 out of 139 found this review helpful

I was hoping for something more along the lines of a struggle of balance for people of mixed cultures, which is what the book is marketed to be. I was dissapointed in the how misleading the books advertising was after reading the content.

However, like many reveiwers before me have said, Barack Obama is an amazing man, and senator. This is still a 'good' book nonetheless.


Do you want a Candidate who did Cocain & Heroin, disrespects his WHITE mother, & has no Experience?!?! Then Obama's YOUR BOY!!!!   April 16, 2008
 99 out of 225 found this review helpful

The ordeal that many reviewers who subserviently brownnose Obama experience is confusing what "Dreams From My Father" accomplishes; Obama's 1995 book DOESN'T in any form come close to qualifying him as presidential material. Shame on the reviewers for abusing a book which tells his mediocre life story from childhood to 33 as the basis for endorsing him!!!! Because of the hype instigated by the liberal media for their favorite mulatto (liberal wet dream of theoretically having the first, sort-of "black" man installed as president), this book's selling aggressively, but in a just world, "Dreams From My Father" should've continued to be relegated to the obscurity it enjoyed before.

This book actively makes the case AGAINST Obama ever becoming president as it fails to present him and his unsatisfactory values in any decent light. I'm in the majority of the country--excluding the 35% of blindly worshipping Democrats who hype Obama due to the misconception they owe the black community for slavery by exalting Obama--which is mystified by the insincere sensationalism surrounding Obama. I picked up this book to investigate this empty suit, yet what I discovered was Obama's substanceless character and disappointment at his ideology and "values!!!!"

I contemptuously distrust that many of the fanatics giving 5-star reviews to Dreams From My Father have actually read the book (probably all Democrat operatives). The book is a disturbing confession of a racially mixed individual with so much emotional baggage that he's ideological, divisive, self-hating, race-hustling, and mistrustful of the goodness that is America. An example of his ideology is he spends much of the book pushing organizing instead of telling blacks to get a better education to increase their pay; his divisiveness is his association with reverse racism which looks at the destiny of blacks as controlled by whites; his self-hate is he actually compares life of the poor in America with the impoverished masses in Kenya; his race-hustling is his choice to associate almost exclusively with blacks (throughout high school, college, inner-city organizing); and his mistrustfulness in America is his longing to connect with African heritage instead of considering himself American foremost.

Much of the book is untrustworthy as Obama presumptuously fakes he's able to remember exact quotes in conversations he's had going back to his childhood!!!! This is simply not plausible, so many personal conversations Obama recounts cannot be believed based on only his memory. Another undesirable sickness his book perpetrates is the unabashed swearing Obama writes down, supposedly recollections from personal conversations, especially blacks in low-class neighborhoods. Nonetheless, this is egregious, repelling the reader.

The premise of Dreams From My Father is so unrighteous that it's skewed: it's an homage to his Muslim father, but his father is unmasked as an exorbitantly dislikeable renegade!!!! His dad is culpable for abandoning Obama's white mother and him at an early age; fathering scores of children in Kenya; being a drunk and abusive husband/father when he was ostracized from the Kenyan government's favor; and dying practically penniless without leaving his family anything.

His father's ignominious memory begs the question why Obama would write a book expressing such yearning for his father and his African heritage, yet the answer is found in reverse racism. Obama doesn't consider himself mulatto; he militantly views himself 100% black. This is desecration considering the whites in his life--Grampa, Toots, his mother--took care of him!!!!

Obama's personal "values" system is quite bankrupt since as a young kid growing up in Hawaii, his coarse Gramps took him to bars in the red light district. Predictably, this damage provoked him to do cocaine and heroin, which he admits on page 87 of his revelatory autobiography.

Some of the most anguishing testimony comes during his college "career"--he never mentions getting an undergraduate degree, yet purports that he had a personal secretary while working as a financial writer in his early 20s!--and working to "organize" black communities in Chicago. This favoritism for blacks was from his father's abandonment and Obama's yearning to get close to his father by associating with blacks exclusively. Being the far-left liberal he is, Obama's primary strategies as a community organizer wasn't telling blacks to get a better education to improve their financial situation. It was menacingly getting churches, black groups and unions together to intimidate the local government to dole out money, the quintessential, Democratic strategy for anything!!!!

Obama's book has misleadingly connected with liberals/progressive sheeple because it's so sappily melodramatic and pretentious. It agonizingly recounts Obama's sob-story of being racially mixed and feeling empty due to his father's absence; this doesn't make him presidential material, only arrogant to assume he's more special than other mixed-race offspring. Obama's shoddy talent does lie in fiction-writing as his style is very rich in vocabulary, complex sentences and scene-setting. Democrats in their moral relativism find this acceptable enough to exaggerate Obama as presidential material (LOL!!!!). The cover caption by Marian Wright Edelman is deceptive as this book WILL NOT TELL YOU ANYTHING about yourself whether you're black or white!!!!