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Dreams from My Father
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Dreams from My Father (1995) (edit title/settings)

A Story of Race and Inheritance

by Barack Obama (Author) (edit contributors)

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Nine years before the Senate campaign that made him one of the most influential and compelling voices in American politics, Barack Obama published this lyrical, unsentimental, and powerfully affecting memoir, which became a #1 New York Times bestseller when it was reissued in 2004. Dreams... read more

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  • “If the language, the humor, the stories of ordinary people were the stuff out of which families, communities, economies would have to be built, then I couldn't separate that strength from the hurt and distortions that lingered inside us.... The stories that I had been hearing from the leadership, all the records of courage and sacrifice and overcoming of great odds, hadn't simply arisen from struggles with pestilence or drought, or even mere poverty. They had arisen out of a very particular experience with hate. That hate hadn't gone away; it formed a counternarrative buried deep within each person and at the center of which stood white people--some cruel, some ignorant, sometimes a single face, sometimes just a faceless image of a system claiming power over our lives. I had to ask myself whether the bonds of community could be restored without collectively exorcising that ghostly figure that haunted black dreams. Could Ruby love herself without hating blue eyes? p. 195”
  • “Nationalism provided that history, an unambiguous morality tale that was easily communicated and easily grasped. A steady attack on the white race, the constant recitation of black people's brutal experience in this country, served as the ballast that could prevent the ideas of personal and communal responsibility from tipping into an ocean of despair. Yes, the nationalist would say, whites are responsible for your sorry state, not any inherent flaws in you. In fact, whites are so heartless and devious that we can no longer expect anything from them. The self-loathing you feel, what keeps you drinking or thieving, is planted by them. Rid them from your mind and find your true power liberated. p. 198, 199”
  • “The continuing struggle to align word and action, our heartfelt desires with a workable plan--didn't self-esteem finally depend on just this? It was that belief which had led me into organizing, and it was that belief which would lead me to conclude, perhaps for the final time, that notions of purity--of race or of culture--could no more serve as the basis for the typical black American's self-esteem than it could for mine. Our sense of wholeness would have to arise from something more fine than the bloodlines we'd inherited. It would have to find root in Mrs. Crenshaw's story and Mr. Marshall's story, in Ruby's story and Rafiq's; in all the messy, contradictory details of our experience.”
  • “Standing in that room, I realized that our two worlds, my friend's and mine, were as distant from each other as Kenya is from Germany. And I knew that if we stayed together I'd eventually live in hers. After all, I'd been doing it most of my life. Between the two of us, I was the one who knew how to live as an outsider. p. 211”
  • “Sure, you could be black and still not give a damn about what happened in Altgeld or Roseland. You didn't have to care about boys like Kyle, young mothers like Bernadette or Sadie. But to be right with yourself, to do right by others, to lend meaning to a community's suffering and take part in its healing--that required something more. It required the kind of commitment that Dr. Collier made every day out in Altgeld. It required the kind of sacrifices a man like Asante had been willing to make with his students.It required faith.... Perhaps, still, I had faith in myself. But faith in one's self was never enough.”
  • “At some point, though, they all told me of having reached a spiritual dead end; a feeling, at once inchoate and oppressive, that they'd been cut off from themselves. Intermittently, then more regularly, they had returned to the church, finding in Trinity some of the same things every religion hopes to offer its converts: a spiritual harbor and the chance to see one's gifts appreciated and acknowledged in a way that a paycheck never can; an assurance, as bones stiffened and hair began to gray, that they belonged to something that would outlast their own lives--and that, when their time finally came, a community would be there to remember. p. 285”
  • “....that underscored my own uneasy status: a Westerner not entirely at home in the West, an African on his way to a land full of strangers. p. 301”
  • “Her restlessness, her independence, her constant willingness to project into the future--all of this struck the family as unnatural somehow. Unnatural...and un-African....Without power for the group, a group larger, even, than an extended family, our success always threatened to leave others behind. And perhaps it was that fact that left me so unsettled--the fact that even here in Africa, the same maddening patterns still held sway.... p. 330, 331”
  • “Maybe it was that courage, I thought, that Africa most desperately needed. Honest, decent men and women with attainable ambitions, and the determination to see those ambitions through. p. 358”
  • “"Tell her how busy I am.""She understands that," Auma said. "But she also says that a man can never be too busy to know his own people." p. 377”
  • “"Truth is usually the best corrective," Rukia said with a smile. "You know, sometimes I think the worst thing that colonialism did was cloud our view of the past. Without the white man, we might be able to make better use of our history. We might look at some of our former practices and decide they are worth preserving. Others, we might grow out of. Unfortunately, the white man has made us very defensive. We end up clinging to all sorts of things that have outlived their usefulness. Polygamy. Collective land ownership. These things worked well in their time, but now they most often become tools for abuse. By men. By governments. And yet, if you say these things, you have been infected by Western ideology.""...But I suspect that we can't pretend that the contradictions of our situation don't exist. All we can do is choose." p. 434”
  • “"They live in a mixed-up world. It's just as well, I suppose. In the end, I'm less interested in a daughter who's authentically African than one who is authentically herself." p. 435”
  • Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
  • Look at yourself before you pass judgment. Don’t make someone else clean up your mess. It’s not about you.
    Highlighted by 162 Kindle customers
  • My identity might begin with the fact of my race, but it didn’t, couldn’t, end there.
    Highlighted by 140 Kindle customers
  • The title of Reverend Wright’s sermon that morning was “The Audacity of Hope.”
    Highlighted by 125 Kindle customers
  • The emotions between the races could never be pure; even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves. Whether we sought out our demons or salvation, the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart.
    Highlighted by 114 Kindle customers
  • What is a family? Is it just a genetic chain, parents and offspring, people like me? Or is it a social construct, an economic unit, optimal for child rearing and divisions of labor? Or is it something else entirely: a store of shared memories, say? An ambit of love? A reach across the void?
    Highlighted by 112 Kindle customers
  • “Sometimes you can’t worry about hurt. Sometimes you worry only about getting where you have to go.”
    Highlighted by 112 Kindle customers
  • I had stumbled upon one of the well-kept secrets about black people: that most of us weren’t interested in revolt; that most of us were tired of thinking about race all the time; that if we preferred to keep to ourselves it was mainly because that was the easiest way to stop thinking about it, easier than spending all your time mad or trying to guess whatever it was that white folks were thinking about you.
    Highlighted by 106 Kindle customers
  • “Now there’s something you can learn from your dad,” he would tell me. “Confidence. The secret to a man’s success.”
    Highlighted by 105 Kindle customers
  • What was she asking of me, then? Determination, mostly. The determination to push against whatever power kept her stooped instead of standing straight. The determination to resist the easy or the expedient. You might be locked into a world not of your own making, her eyes said, but you still have a claim on how it is shaped. You still have responsibilities.
    Highlighted by 90 Kindle customers
  • The study of law can be disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power—and that all too often seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness of their condition. But that’s not all the law is. The law is also memory; the law also records a long-running conversation, a nation arguing with its conscience.
    Highlighted by 87 Kindle customers
Show all 22 quotes from this book

First Sentence edit see section history

A few months after my twenty-first birthday, a stranger called to give me the news.

Table of Contents edit see section history

Part I: Origins
Part II: Chicago
Part III: Kenya

Series & Lists edit see section history

This is book 7 of 7 in Tesco Biography of the Year. (community list)

Preceded by My Booky Wook.

This is book 2 of 100 in Top 100 Books That Defined The Noughties (Telegraph). (authoritative list)

Preceded by Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and followed by The Da Vinci Code.

This book is in KCPL Discussion Kit (Aug2010). (community list)
This book is in TIME Magazine's All-TIME 100 Best Nonfiction Books. (authoritative list)
This is book 80 of 26 in Top selling 100 books 1998-2010 (Guardian). (authoritative list)

Preceded by Schott's Original Miscellany, and followed by The Dangerous Book for Boys.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Barack Obama (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: Crown Publishers
Country: USA
Publication Date: 1995
ISBN: Add the ISBN.
Page Count: 442

Classification edit see section history

  • Library of Congress: E185.97.O23
  • Dewey: 973.04960730092

More Books Like This edit see section history

   
  • Memoirs and Selected Letters

Books That Cite This Book edit see section history

   
  • Breaking the Sound Barrier

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