Dreams from my father A story of race and inheritance

Barack Obama

Book - 2004

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Subjects
Published
New York : Three Rivers Press c2004.
Language
English
Main Author
Barack Obama (-)
Edition
1st pbk. ed
Item Description
Originally published: New York : Times Books, c1995.
Re-issued in hardcover in 2007: New York : Crown Publishers
Physical Description
xvii, 442 p.
ISBN
9781400082773
9780307383419
Contents unavailable.
Review by Choice Review

Obama is only 33, which may seem rather young to write a memoir. But this son of a mixed marriage offers an account of his life's journey that reflects brilliantly on the power of race consciousness in America. His mother, a white woman from Kansas, and his father, a black African student, met in Hawaii; their marriage propelled Obama on a long search for personal identity in a world shaped by racial divisions. Along the way he achieved a good deal, graduating from Harvard Law School, where he was president of the Harvard Law Review. In recent years he has practiced civil rights law in Chicago and worked as a community organizer. He also developed much wisdom about racial struggle, the strength of family ties, the power of forgiveness, and the power of people to bind together in the face of adversity. Obama writes well; his account is sensitive, probing, and compelling. This book is appropriate for general readers and for academic libraries supporting African American studies or studies of modern American culture. R. Detweiler; California State University, Dominguez Hills

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review

MANY AMERICANS MIGHT not know the more polemical side of race writing in our history. The canon of African-American literature is well established. Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, James Baldwin are familiar figures. Far less so is Samuel Morton (champion of the obsolete theory of polygenesis) or Thomas Dixon (author of novels romanticizing Klan violence). It is tempting to think that the influence of those dusty polemics ebbed as the dust accumulated. But their legacy persists, freshly shaping much of our racial discourse. On the occasion of Black History Month, I've selected the most influential books on race and the black experience published in the United States for each decade of the nation's existence - a history of race through ideas, arranged chronologically on the shelf. (In many cases, I've added a complementary work, noted with an asterisk.) Each of these books was either published first in the United States or widely read by Americans. They inspired - and sometimes ended - the fiercest debates of their times: debates over slavery, segregation, mass incarceration. They offered racist explanations for inequities, and antiracist correctives. Some - the poems of Phillis Wheatley, the memoir of Frederick Douglass - stand literature's test of time. Others have been roundly debunked by science, by data, by human experience. No list can ever be comprehensive, and "most influential" by no means signifies "best." But I would argue that together, these works tell the history of anti-black racism in the United States as painfully, as eloquently, as disturbingly as words can. In many ways, they also tell its present. 1771-1780 POEMS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL, by Phillis Wheatley (1773) No book during the Revolutionary era stirred more debates over slavery than this first-ever book by an African-American woman. Assimilationists and abolitionists exhibited Wheatley and her poetry as proof that an "uncultivated barbarian from Africa" could be civilized, that enslaved Africans "may be refin'd, and join th' angelic train" of European civilization and human freedom. Phillis Wheatley Enslavers disagreed, and lashed out at Wheatley's "Poems." * "An Address to the Inhabitants of British Settlements, on the Slavery of the Negroes in America," by Benjamin Rush (1773) 1781-1790 NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA, by Thomas Jefferson (1785) The author of American freedom in 1776 wrote of American slavery as a necessary evil in this book, widely regarded as the most important political portrait of the nascent United States. Jefferson indicted the "tyranny" Ibram x. kendi, a professor of history at the University of Florida, won the National Book Award for "Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America." of slavery while also supplying fellow slaveholders with a batch of prejudices to justify slavery's rapid expansion. Blacks "are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind," he wrote. And Wheatley is not "a poet." *"The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; Or, Gustavus Vassa, the African" (1789) 1791-1800 PENNSYLVANIA, DELAWARE, MARYLAND, AND VIRGINIA ALMANAC AND EPHEMERS, by Benjamin Banneker (1792-97) After helping to survey the District of Columbia, Banneker compiled his first almanac, replacing Wheatley's "Poems" as abolitionists' finest showpiece of black capability. He enclosed the almanac in a letter to Jefferson, writing, "I apprehend you will embrace every opportunity, to eradicate that train of absurd and false ideas and opinions." Jefferson did not jump off the train, but other Americans did while reading this remarkable book. Thomas Jefferson 1801-1810 AN ESSAY ON THE CAUSES OF VARIETY OF COMPLEXION AND FIGURE IN THE HUMAN SPECIES, by Samuel Stanhope Smith (second edition, 1810) The Princeton president tried to stop the polygenesis theory that the races are created unequal, stoutly defending biblical monogenesis and the notion that first humans were white. He called for physical assimilation: In a colder climate blackened skins would revert to their original white beauty; "the woolly substance" on black heads would become "fine, straight hair" again. His racist idea of the lighter and straighter the better still demeans after all these years. 1811-1820 THOUGHTS ON THE COLONIZATION OF FREE BLACKS, by Robert Finley (1816) Blacks should be freed, trained "for self-government" and returned to Africa, according to the antislavery clergyman and former student of Samuel Stanhope Smith. Finley wrote the manifesto for colonization, a cause supported by several American leaders until Lincoln's failed schemes doomed the movement during the Civil War. *"An Appeal From the Judgments of Great Britain Respecting the United States of America," by Robert Walsh (1819) 1821-1830 AN APPEAL TO THE COLORED CITIZENS OF THE WORLD, by David Walker (1829) This Boston abolitionist viciously assailed colonization and "Mr. Jefferson's arguments" in the first booklength attack on the "inhuman system of slavery" by an African-American. Black seamen smuggled the appeal into chained Southern hands; community readers sounded the appeal to violently throw off the violent yoke. Walker's ultimatum for slaveholders: Give us freedom and rights, or you will "curse the day that you ever were born! " 1831-1840 CRANIA AMERICANA, by Samuel Morton (1839) This book revived the theory of polygenesis that dominated intellectual racial discourse until the Civil War. What reviewers hailed as an "immense body of facts" were Morton's measurements of the "mean internal capacity" of the human skulls in his renowned collection in Philadelphia, from which he concluded that whites had the "highest intellectual endowments." * "Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature of 1831 and 1832," by Thomas Roderick Dew (1832), and "Thoughts on African Colonization," by William Lloyd Garrison (1832) 1841-1850 THE NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS (1845) The gripping best seller earned Douglass international prestige and forced readers around the world to come to terms with slavery's brutality and blacks' freedom dreams. No other piece of antislavery literature so devastated Morton's defense of polygenesis, or John C. Calhoun's recently popularized theory that slavery was a "positive good." *"The Narrative of Sojourner Truth" (1850) 1851-1860 UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852) Inflamed by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Stowe offered a fugitive slave story that made millions sympathize with slaves. Her novel - and its dramatic adaptations - turned the "hard and dominant Anglo-Saxon race" toward Christian salvation with a simple lesson: to stop enslaving quintessential Christians in all their "lowly docility of heart." From accommodating Uncle Toms to superior mulattoes to soulful Africans, the book also popularized any number of lasting racist tropes. *"On the Origin of Species," by Charles Darwin (1859) 1861-1870 THE PRINCIPLES OF BIOLOGY, by Herbert Spencer (1864) In "Principles," Spencer coined the term "survival of the fittest," becoming the ultimate amplifier of Social Darwinism in the United States. Americans fell in love with his comprehensive theory of evolution, claiming that Reconstruction policies would allow inferior blacks to evolve (or assimilate) into white civilization or lose the struggle for existence. The net effect of Spencer's Social Darwinism: the eugenics movement of the early 20th century. * "Hereditary Genius," by Sir Francis Gabon (1869) 1871-1880 THE PROSTRATE STATE: South Carolina Under Negro Government, by James Pike (1874) This prominent New York journalist blanketed the nation with fairy tales of corrupt, incompetent, lazy Black Republican politicians. Reconstruction's enfranchising policies were a "tragedy," Pike wrote, nothing but "the slave rioting in the halls of his master." His "objective" reporting caused many once sympathetic Northerners to demand a national reunion based on white rule. *"The Descent of Man," by Charles Darwin (1871) 1881-1890 OUR BROTHER IN BLACK: His Freedom and His Future, by Atticus Haygood (1881) In the 1880s, Southern segregationists marketed their region as the New South, among them this Methodist bishop and Emory College president. In his popular book, Haygood eased consciences that the end of Reconstruction meant the end of black rights. The New South will be as good for black folk as the old, Haygood declared, as new white Southerners would continue to civilize inferior black folk in their nicely segregated free-labor society. *"The Plantation Negro as a Freeman," by Philip Alexander Bruce (1889) 1891-1900 RACE TRAITS AND TENDENCIES OF THE AMERICAN NEGRO, by Frederick Hoffman (1896) Better covered than the Plessy v. Ferguson decision that year, "Race Traits" catapulted this statistician into scientific celebrity. At the time of emancipation, blacks were "healthy in body and cheerful in mind," Hoffman wrote. Thirty years later, the 1890 census forecasts their "gradual extinction," due to natural immoralities and a propensity for diseases. He blazed the trail of racist ideas in American criminology when he concluded that higher black arrest rates indicated blacks committed more crimes. * "Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases," by Ida B. Wells (1892) 1901-1910 THE CLANSMAN: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, by Thomas Dixon (1905) Convinced that "Uncle Tom's Cabin" had misrepresented the South, Dixon emerged as Jim Crow's novelist laureate. "The Clansman" was the most influential of his works, particularly after it was adapted into a popular play and D. W. Griffith's 1915 film "The Birth of a Nation." In Dixon's telling, the virtuous Ku Klux Klan saved Southern whites from their "awful suffering" during Reconstruction. * "The Souls of Black Folk," by W. E. B. Du Bois (1903) 1911-1920 TARZAN OF THE APES, by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1912) With his racist colonial plot, Burroughs glued animals, savages and Africa together in the American mind, and redeemed white masculinity after the first black heavyweight champion knocked it out in 1908. Forget boxing and Jack Johnson - white men embraced Tarzan, the inspiration for comic strips, 25 sequels and dozens of motion pictures. *"The Passing of the Great Race," by Madison Grant (1916) 1921-1930 NIGGER HEAVEN, by Carl Van Vechten (1926) Van Vechten was the Harlem Renaissance's ubiquitous white patron, a man as curiously passionate about showing off black people as zookeepers are about showing off their rare species. Through this best-selling novel, he gave white Americans a racist tour of the safari of Harlem, casting assimilated blacks in the guise of tropical exotic lands being spoiled by white developers. *"The Weary Blues," by Langston Hughes (1926) 1931-1940 GONE WITH THE WIND, by Margaret Mitchell (1936) The Pulitzer Prize-winning jewel of the plantation fiction genre, this was Americans' second all-time favorite book behind the Bible, according to a 2014 f Harris Poll. Mitchell portrays white enslavers as noble, slaves as shiftless, docile and loyal. Mitchell did for slavery what Dixon did for Reconstruction and Burroughs for Africa. * "Their Eyes Were Watching God," Zora Neale Hurston (1937) and "Native Son," by Richard Wright (1940) 1941-1950 AN AMERICAN DILEMMA: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, by Gunnar Myrdal (1944) As Americans fought against Nazism overseas, this Swedish economist served up an encyclopedic revelation of racial discrimination in their backyards. If there was a scholarly trigger for the civil rights movement, this was it. Myrdal concluded that "a great majority" of whites would "give the Negro a substantially better deal if they knew the facts." Segregationists seethed, and racial reformers were galvanized to show the truth of Jim Crow. *"Race: Science and Politics," by Ruth Benedict (revised edition, 1943) 1951-1960 TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, by Harper Lee (1960) This instant classic about a white lawyer defending a black man wrongly accused of rape was the "Uncle Tom's Cabin" of the civil rights movement. "Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy," a neighbor tells the lawyer's daughter, Scout. She's talking about their reclusive white neighbor, Boo Radley, but the African-Americans of 1930s Alabama come across as singing spectators, thankful for the moral heroism of Atticus Finch. The white savior remains the most popular racist character in American letters. * "Invisible Man," by Ralph Ellison (1952) 1961-1970 THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X, as told to Alex Haley (1965) It was the manifesto for the Black Power movement, where young black saviors arose, alienated by white saviors and the slow pace of civil rights change. Malcolm wrote black pride before James Brown sang it. His ideological transformation from assimilationist to anti-white separatist to antiracist inspired millions of all races. * "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," by Maya Angelou (1969) 1971-1980 ROOTS: The Saga of an American Family, by Alex Haley (1976) For African-Americans in the radiance of Black Power's turn to Pan-Africanism, the thrilling and terrifying story of Kunta Kinte and his descendants arrived right on time. The best seller inspired one of the most watched shows in American television history. "Roots" dispatched legions of racist ideas of backward Africa, of civilizing slavery, of the contented slave, of loose enslaved women. The plantation genre of happy mammies and Sambos was gone with the wind. * "The Declining Significance of Race," by William Julius Wilson (1978) 1981-1990 THE COLOR PURPLE, by Alice Walker (1982) Of the black feminist classics of the period, Walker's garnered the most prestige - a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize - and controversy. Set in 1930s rural Georgia, the story shows a black woman finding happiness beyond abusive black patriarchs, Southern poverty and racist whites. Steven Spielberg's 1985 blockbuster adaptation cemented its legacy. * "Beloved," by Toni Morrison (1987) 1991-2000 THE BELL CURVE: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray (1994) Herrnstein and Murray offered validation for Americans raging about pathological blacks and crime, welfare and affirmative action. "Inequality of endowments, including intelligence, is a reality," they wrote, sparking one of the most intense academic wars in history over whether genes or environment had caused the racial "achievement gap" in standardized test scores. * "America in Black and White," by Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom (1997) 2001-2010 THE NEW JIM CROW: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander (2010) Two years after Obama's election, Alexander put the entire criminal justice system on trial, exposing racial discrimination from lawmaking to policing to the denial of voting rights to exprisoners. This best seller struck the spark that would eventually Michelle Alexander light the fire of Black Lives Matter. * "Dreams From My Father," by Barack Obama (2004 reprint) ?

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 1, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review

Obama argues with himself on almost every page of this lively autobiographical conversation. He gets you to agree with him, and then he brings in a counternarrative that seems just as convincing. Son of a white American mother and of a black Kenyan father whom he never knew, Obama grew up mainly in Hawaii. After college, he worked for three years as a community organizer on Chicago's South Side. Then, finally, he went to Kenya, to find the world of his dead father, his "authentic" self. Will the truth set you free, Obama asks? Or will it disappoint? Both, it seems. His search for himself as a black American is rooted in the particulars of his daily life; it also reads like a wry commentary about all of us. He dismisses stereotypes of the "tragic mulatto" and then shows how much we are all caught between messy contradictions and disparate communities. He discovers that Kenya has 400 different tribes, each of them with stereotypes of the others. Obama is candid about racism and poverty and corruption, in Chicago and in Kenya. Yet he does find community and authenticity, not in any romantic cliche{{‚}}, but with "honest, decent men and women who have attainable ambitions and the determination to see them through." (Reviewed July 1995)081292343XHazel Rochman

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama was offered a book contract, but the intellectual journey he planned to recount became instead this poignant, probing memoir of an unusual life. Born in 1961 to a white American woman and a black Kenyan student, Obama was reared in Hawaii by his mother and her parents, his father having left for further study and a return home to Africa. So Obama's not-unhappy youth is nevertheless a lonely voyage to racial identity, tensions in school, struggling with black literature‘with one month-long visit when he was 10 from his commanding father. After college, Obama became a community organizer in Chicago. He slowly found place and purpose among folks of similar hue but different memory, winning enough small victories to commit himself to the work‘he's now a civil rights lawyer there. Before going to law school, he finally visited Kenya; with his father dead, he still confronted obligation and loss, and found wellsprings of love and attachment. Obama leaves some lingering questions‘his mother is virtually absent‘but still has written a resonant book. Photos not seen by PW. Author tour. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

An honest, often poetic memoir about growing up biracial. Obama was the son of a Kenyan student at the University of Hawaii and a white woman, the daughter of transplanted Kansans. Their marriage broke up after Barack Obama Sr. left Hawaii in 1963 to pursue a Ph.D. at Harvard; he died in a car accident in Kenya in 1982, when his son was 21. The author met his father only once, when he was ten years old, and this encounter with a stranger did not resolve his emotional confusion about his identity. ``I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know what that meant,'' writes Obama. He turned to books by Ralph Ellison and Langston Hughes and to neighborhood basketball courts, where he bonded with older black men. Obama records his interior struggle with precision and clarity as he confronts racism (a high school basketball coach calls a group of black men ``niggers'') while maintaining love for his white relatives. He turns to drugs and alcohol to dull his confusion, but finally realizes that his identity as a black man in America must be a path he creates for himself. Subsequently, while a student at Columbia University, he learns of his father's death just after they have made plans for him to visit Kenya. The unresolved nature of their relationship gnaws at him even after he moves to Chicago, where he practices civil rights law. A pilgrimage to Kenya to meet siblings from his father's two other marriages finally enables him to put his demons to rest. At its best, despite an occasional lack of analysis, this affecting study of self-definition perceptively reminds us that the dilemmas of race generally express themselves in terms of individual human struggles. (author tour)

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Preface to the 2004 Edition Almost a decade has passed since this book was first published. As I mention in the original introduction, the opportunity to write the book came while I was in law school, the result of my election as the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review . In the wake of some modest publicity, I received an advance from a publisher and went to work with the belief that the story of my family, and my efforts to understand that story, might speak in some way to the fissures of race that have characterized the American experience, as well as the fluid state of identity -- the leaps through time, the collision of cultures -- that mark our modern life. Like most first-time authors, I was filled with hope and despair upon the book's publication -- hope that the book might succeed beyond my youthful dreams, despair that I had failed to say anything worth saying. The reality fell somewhere in between. The reviews were mildly favorable. People actually showed up at the readings my publisher arranged. The sales were underwhelming. And, after a few months, I went on with the business of my life, certain that my career as an author would be short-lived, but glad to have survived the process with my dignity more or less intact. I had little time for reflection over the next ten years. I ran a voter registration project in the 1992 election cycle, began a civil rights practice, and started teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago. My wife and I bought a house, were blessed with two gorgeous, healthy, and mischievous daughters, and struggled to pay the bills. When a seat in the state legislature opened up in 1996, some friends persuaded me to run for the office, and I won. I had been warned, before taking office, that state politics lacks the glamour of its Washington counterpart; one labors largely in obscurity, mostly on topics that mean a great deal to some but that the average man or woman on the street can safely ignore (the regulation of mobile homes, say, or the tax consequences of farm equipment depreciation). Nonetheless, I found the work satisfying, mostly because the scale of state politics allows for concrete results -- an expansion of health insurance for poor children, or a reform of laws that send innocent men to death row -- within a meaningful time frame. And too, because within the capitol building of a big, industrial state, one sees every day the face of a nation in constant conversation: inner-city mothers and corn and bean farmers, immigrant day laborers alongside suburban investment bankers -- all jostling to be heard, all ready to tell their stories. A few months ago, I won the Democratic nomination for a seat as the U.S. senator from Illinois. It was a difficult race, in a crowded field of well-funded, skilled, and prominent candidates; without organizational backing or personal wealth, a black man with a funny name, I was considered a long shot. And so, when I won a majority of the votes in the Democratic primary, winning in white areas as well as black, in the suburbs as well as Chicago, the reaction that followed echoed the response to my election to the Law Review . Mainstream commentators expressed surprise and genuine hope that my victory signaled a broader change in our racial politics. Within the black community, there was a sense of pride regarding my accomplishment, a pride mingled with frustration that fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education and forty years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, we should still be celebrating the possibility (and only the possibility, for I have a tough general election coming up) that I might be the sole African American -- and only the third since Reconstruction -- to serve in the Senate. My family, friends, and I were mildly bewildered by the attention, and constantly aware of the gulf between the hard sheen of media reports and the messy, mundane realities of life as it is truly lived. Just as that spate of publicity prompted my publisher's interest a decade ago, so has this fresh round of news clippings encouraged the book's re-publication. For the first time in many years, I've pulled out a copy and read a few chapters to see how much my voice may have changed over time. I confess to wincing every so often at a poorly chosen word, a mangled sentence, an expression of emotion that seems indulgent or overly practiced. I have the urge to cut the book by fifty pages or so, possessed as I am with a keener appreciation for brevity. I cannot honestly say, however, that the voice in this book is not mine -- that I would tell the story much differently today than I did ten years ago, even if certain passages have proven to be inconvenient politically, the grist for pundit commentary and opposition research. What has changed, of course, dramatically, decisively, is the context in which the book might now be read. I began writing against a backdrop of Silicon Valley and a booming stock market; the collapse of the Berlin Wall; Mandela -- in slow, sturdy steps -- emerging from prison to lead a country; the signing of peace accords in Oslo. Domestically, our cultural debates -- around guns and abortion and rap lyrics -- seemed so fierce precisely because Bill Clinton's Third Way, a scaled-back welfare state without grand ambition but without sharp edges, seemed to describe a broad, underlying consensus on bread-and-butter issues, a consensus to which even George W. Bush's first campaign, with its "compassionate conservatism," would have to give a nod. Internationally, writers announced the end of history, the ascendance of free markets and liberal democracy, the replacement of old hatreds and wars between nations with virtual communities and battles for market share. And then, on September 11, 2001, the world fractured. It's beyond my skill as a writer to capture that day, and the days that would follow -- the planes, like specters, vanishing into steel and glass; the slow-motion cascade of the towers crumbling into themselves; the ash-covered figures wandering the streets; the anguish and the fear. Nor do I pretend to understand the stark nihilism that drove the terrorists that day and that drives their brethren still. My powers of empathy, my ability to reach into another's heart, cannot penetrate the blank stares of those who would murder innocents with abstract, serene satisfaction. What I do know is that history returned that day with a vengeance; that, in fact, as Faulkner reminds us, the past is never dead and buried -- it isn't even past. This collective history, this past, directly touches my own. Not merely because the bombs of Al Qaeda have marked, with an eerie precision, some of the landscapes of my life -- the buildings and roads and faces of Nairobi, Bali, Manhattan; not merely because, as a consequence of 9/11, my name is an irresistible target of mocking websites from overzealous Republican operatives. But also because the underlying struggle -- between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together, and those who would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us -- is the struggle set forth, on a miniature scale, in this book. I know, I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago's South Side, how narrow the path is for them between humiliation and untrammeled fury, how easily they slip into violence and despair. I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder -- alternating as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware -- is inadequate to the task. I know that the hardening of lines, the embrace of fundamentalism and tribe, dooms us all. And so what was a more interior, intimate effort on my part, to understand this struggle and to find my place in it, has converged with a broader public debate, a debate in which I am professionally engaged, one that will shape our lives and the lives of our children for many years to come. The policy implications of all this are a topic for another book. Let me end instead on a more personal note. Most of the characters in this book remain a part of my life, albeit in varying degrees -- a function of work, children, geography, and turns of fate. The exception is my mother, whom we lost, with a brutal swiftness, to cancer a few months after this book was published. She had spent the previous ten years doing what she loved. She traveled the world, working in the distant villages of Asia and Africa, helping women buy a sewing machine or a milk cow or an education that might give them a foothold in the world's economy. She gathered friends from high and low, took long walks, stared at the moon, and foraged through the local markets of Delhi or Marrakesh for some trifle, a scarf or stone carving that would make her laugh or please the eye. She wrote reports, read novels, pestered her children, and dreamed of grandchildren. We saw each other frequently, our bond unbroken. During the writing of this book, she would read the drafts, correcting stories that I had misunderstood, careful not to comment on my characterizations of her but quick to explain or defend the less flattering aspects of my father's character. She managed her illness with grace and good humor, and she helped my sister and me push on with our lives, despite our dread, our denials, our sudden constrictions of the heart. I think sometimes that had I known she would not survive her illness, I might have written a different book -- less a meditation on the absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life. In my daughters I see her every day, her joy, her capacity for wonder. I won't try to describe how deeply I mourn her passing still. I know that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her. Excerpted from Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.