Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. by Obama, Barack - 2004

New York: Crown Publishers, 2004. First edition, first printing of the 2004 reissue of the future President's first book. Octavo, original half cloth, illustrated. Boldly signed by Barack Obama and by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison on the title page. In discussing Dreams from Father, Morrison called Obama, "a writer in my high esteem" and the book "quite extraordinary." She praised, "his ability to reflect on this extraordinary mesh of experiences that he has had, some familiar and some not, and to really meditate on that the way he does, and to set up scenes in narrative structure, dialogue, conversation--all of these things that you don't often see, obviously, in the routine political memoir biography.... It's unique. It's his. There are no other ones like that." Fine in a fine dust jacket. Jacket collage by Steven Dana. In 2008 Obama was the first African American elected to President of the United States of America. In 1993 Toni Morrison was the first African American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. On May 29, 2012, President Obama presented Morrison with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Rare and desirable signed both Obama and Morrison. "All men live in the shadow of their fathers—the more distant the father, the deeper the shadow. Barack Obama describes his confrontation with this shadow in his provocative autobiography and he also persuasively describes the phenomenon of belonging to two different worlds, and thus belonging to neither At a young age and without much experience as a writer, Barack Obama has bravely tackled the complexities of his remarkable upbringing" (The New York Times). In discussing Dreams from My Father, Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison has called Obama "a writer in my high esteem" and the book "quite extraordinary." She praised "his ability to reflect on this extraordinary mesh of experiences that he has had, some familiar and some not, and to really meditate on that the way he does, and to set up scenes in narrative structure, dialogue, conversation—all of these things that you don't often see, obviously, in the routine political memoir biography. It's unique. It's his. There are no other ones like that." Time Magazine listed the book on its top 100 non-fiction books written in English since 1923.