Barak Obama's "Dreams from My Father"

This was an wonderfully readable autobiography. The style, the language, the ideas, the honesty are all wonderful. This strikes me as the work of an accomplished novelist, not a lawyer writing his first book. In that sense I truly enjoyed the book.

What I found tedious was the focus on his "race identity" and his harping on how tough life is for blacks. I understand that life is tough. I understand racism. But all this complaining is coming from a guy who went to an exclusive prep school and got a Harvard Law degree. It is a bit much. The book is honest, but what came through to me was an excessive self indulgence and identification with "my brothers" the beaten down black folks. I understand that he took this on as a cause, but this guy is from the elite, not the dispossessed.

Another thing that bothered me throughout the book was the excessive focus on his father. The guy was a deadbeat and a jerk. He already had a wife and two kids when he married Barack Obama's mother. That's bad enough. But he soon abandoned her. He had two graduate school offers. One from Columbia which had enough money to bring his wife and new son to live with him while he studied. The other was to Harvard with only enough money for himself. So Barack's father chose Harvard. There is no bitterness is Barack over this abandonment. He never talks about the injustice of this treatment of his mother, the new wife. Instead Obama goes on and on about the plight of the "black folk".

It ends up that he father was a very clever but very self-centred man. He had a number of wives and treated them all badly. He got involved with politics but allowed his ego to cause him to have a falling out with the new greedy elite in Kenya so he suffered a devastating loss of wealth and power but was too proud to change his ways. (I sure hope Barack Obama doesn't show similar traits, that would mean America would be subject to abysmal treatment by a man unable to face reality. Honestly I don't think this will happen. I think Barack is significantly different from his father -- probably due to the influence of his mother and maternal grandparents -- so this danger is probably not real.)

The book is an eye-opener. It is very honest. It shows a wonderful sensitivity to people. It shows Barack's ideals. But it also shows him to be a bit of a nut with his focus on the plight of the poor "black folk". This book was written in 1995 before his big success as a politician. I'm hoping that his exposure to the broader community soften this fixation of his. (I'm pretty sure it did.) But this book is cause for a bit of concern in a few areas:

• His father was a deceitful, manipulative man and there is the worry of how much this trait is genetic versus learned. My guess is that the genetic component is over 50%. Therefore the worry.


• As a troubled youth, Obama developed a victimization syndrome of identifying with the "black folk". This is bizarre because he had an elite upbringing and had to work hard to slum among the down-and-out. While empathy is great, a fixation -- especially if it distorts reality -- is not healthy.


• I worry a great deal about the imbalance between his white relatives and his black relatives. His account of the black relatives shows a pretty dysfunctional group (except for Aume who appears to be pretty solid). His white mother is nearly invisible. But she spent a lot of effort raising him. Meanwhile most of the book dotes on his father who was at best a cad, and more likely a con artist. His grandparents cared for him for many years and paid his way through an elite prep school, but they get a clearly second tier treatment. He never criticizes directly but he allows some faily low opinions to colour the text. You can read his grandfather's taking him to poker games, bars, and visits with a black poet as a loser slumming it on the black side of town or you can read it as a white grandfather trying to help Barack make contacts with the black community to get a better sense of self. My guess it was the later, but Obama's book can be read either way. That bothers me.
  

The book is fascinating. It is well worth your reading, especially because this guy is the president. I still like the guy, but this book was a bit of a shocker for me. It was far more one-sided than I expected from a guy who sold himself as bridging the gap between black and white in American society.