Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

US: Crown Publishing Group, 2004. Paperback. Good. #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • ONE OF ESSENCE'S 50 MOST IMPACTFUL BLACK BOO KS OF THE PAST 50 YEARS In this iconic memoir of his early days, Barack Obama "guides us straight t o the intersection of the most serious questions of identity, class, and ra ce" (The Washington Post Book World). "Quite extraordinary."--Toni Morrison In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black A frican father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning t o his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama l earns that his father--a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man--has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odys sey--first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother's family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the Afr ican side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father's life, a nd at last reconciles his divided inheritance. Praise for Dreams from My Father "Beautifully crafted . . . moving and candid . . . This book belongs on the shelf beside works like James McBride's The Color of Water and Gregory How ard Williams's Life on the Color Line as a tale of living astride America's racial categories."--Scott Turow "Provocative . . . Persuasively describes the phenomenon of belonging to tw o different worlds, and thus belonging to neither."--The New York Times Boo k Review "Obama's writing is incisive yet forgiving. This is a book worth savoring." --Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here "One of the most powerful books of self-discovery I've ever read, all the more so for it.