Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

Barack Obama

Crown Publishing Group, Jan 9, 2007 - Biography & Autobiography - 442 pages

In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns 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 odyssey—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 African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance.


Pictured in lefthand photograph on cover: Habiba Akumu Hussein and Barack Obama, Sr. (President Obama's paternal grandmother and his father as a young boy). Pictured in righthand photograph on cover: Stanley Dunham and Ann Dunham (President Obama's maternal grandfather and his mother as a young girl).


From the Trade Paperback edition.

What people are saying

Review: Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

User Review  - Jacob - Goodreads

Voted for the guy but hadn't read his book, am the worst citizen. In the introduction Obama says that he was initially going to write a different book, a collection of essays on race and legal issues ...

Review: Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

User Review  - Nathalie - Goodreads

Great book to understand the man behind the President.

About the author

BARACK OBAMA was elected President of the United States on November 4, 2008. He is also the author of the New York Times bestseller The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
• Author: Barack Obama
• Publisher: Crown Publishing Group, 2007
• ISBN: 0307394123, 9780307394125
• Length: 442 pages
• Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / Presidents & Heads of State; Social Science / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies