First let me say that I'm not extrapolating anything I say about the book to apply to Obama's political ambitions. This is strictly about the book.
Second, I am only three chapters into it, which means he's still talking about his childhood, and that means some of the matters I find wanting wouldn't be addressed in his "adult's recreation of a child's mind," though I think one can still take issue with the way the adult orders the reminiscences.
Here's the thing: he titles it DREAMS FROM MY FATHER, for a father he never knew. Later in the book, in the section called "Kenya," it seems he journeys back to his father's land to do a ROOTS kind of thing (from glimpsing that early section I know he ever mentions ROOTS by name).
But why should he be titling it DREAMS FROM MY FATHER when, by all indications, his father seems to have done a "Madame Butterfly" routine on Barack's American mother? He marries a woman in a foreign land and then goes back to his own world, apparently making no attempt to keep in contact with the flesh of his flesh until Barack was in fifth grade. This wasn't a slave picked up off the African coast a la Alex Haley, but a man who apparently had *some* control of his own actions.
I'm trying to withhold judgment, believe it or not. I know a lot can happen in the big bad world that separates people. And yet, just the idea of his calling his book DREAMS FROM MY FATHER when Barack was actually raised by his mother and grandparents, just seems really wrong. I assume that sooner or later he'll say SOMETHING about it, yet it's ironic that early in the book he chides his grandfather for an incident that supposedly showed "a strategy to avoid hard issues" (the incident was that when a bystander mistook young Barack for a Hawaiian, grampy didn't indignantly correct the stranger as to Barack's heritage).
Also, for a guy who now talks a lot about racial healing, there sure is a lot about racial divides in this section. Of course, Barack wrote it when his only claim to fame was being the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, so perhaps his views have matured since this book-- which, as I repeat, I haven't finished.
Still, I can't help getting a certain cold, calculated quality from these chapters, and I don't think that's going to go away. If you liked the book better than I, I suppose you can argue that it's the eye of the beholder.
Second, I am only three chapters into it, which means he's still talking about his childhood, and that means some of the matters I find wanting wouldn't be addressed in his "adult's recreation of a child's mind," though I think one can still take issue with the way the adult orders the reminiscences.
Here's the thing: he titles it DREAMS FROM MY FATHER, for a father he never knew. Later in the book, in the section called "Kenya," it seems he journeys back to his father's land to do a ROOTS kind of thing (from glimpsing that early section I know he ever mentions ROOTS by name).
But why should he be titling it DREAMS FROM MY FATHER when, by all indications, his father seems to have done a "Madame Butterfly" routine on Barack's American mother? He marries a woman in a foreign land and then goes back to his own world, apparently making no attempt to keep in contact with the flesh of his flesh until Barack was in fifth grade. This wasn't a slave picked up off the African coast a la Alex Haley, but a man who apparently had *some* control of his own actions.
I'm trying to withhold judgment, believe it or not. I know a lot can happen in the big bad world that separates people. And yet, just the idea of his calling his book DREAMS FROM MY FATHER when Barack was actually raised by his mother and grandparents, just seems really wrong. I assume that sooner or later he'll say SOMETHING about it, yet it's ironic that early in the book he chides his grandfather for an incident that supposedly showed "a strategy to avoid hard issues" (the incident was that when a bystander mistook young Barack for a Hawaiian, grampy didn't indignantly correct the stranger as to Barack's heritage).
Also, for a guy who now talks a lot about racial healing, there sure is a lot about racial divides in this section. Of course, Barack wrote it when his only claim to fame was being the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, so perhaps his views have matured since this book-- which, as I repeat, I haven't finished.
Still, I can't help getting a certain cold, calculated quality from these chapters, and I don't think that's going to go away. If you liked the book better than I, I suppose you can argue that it's the eye of the beholder.
