Dreams from My Father

See also: Dreams from My Real Father

Dreams from My Father

Author	Barack Obama
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Memoir
Publisher	Times Books (1995) Three Rivers Press (2004)
Publication date	July 18, 1995 August 10, 2004
Media type	Book
Pages	403 (1995) 442 (2004)
ISBN	1-4000-8277-3
OCLC	55534889
Dewey Decimal	973/.0405967625009/0092 B 22
LC Class	E185.97.O23 A3 2004
Followed by	The Audacity of Hope

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance is a memoir by future U.S. President Barack Obama, that chronicles the events of his early years up until his entry into law school in 1988. Dreams from My Father was first published in 1995 as Obama was preparing to launch his political career in a campaign for Illinois Senate, five years after being elected as the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review in 1990.

Obama's U.S. Senate Democratic primary victory in Illinois in 2004 led to the book's re-publication in August that same year. This was followed by his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention (DNC). Obama would later launch his campaign to be elected President of the United States three years later. The 2004 edition includes a new preface by Obama and his DNC keynote address.

Narrative

Further information: Early life and career of Barack Obama

Obama recounts his life up to his enrollment in Harvard Law School. He was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Barack Obama, Sr. of Kenya, and Ann Dunham of Wichita, Kansas, who had met as students at the University of Hawaii. Obama's parents separated in 1963 and divorced in 1964, when he was two. Obama’s father went to Harvard to pursue his Ph.D. in economics. After that, he returned to Kenya to fulfill his promise to his nation. Obama formed an image of his absent father from stories told by his mother and her parents. He saw his father only one more time, in 1971, when Obama Sr. came to Hawaii for a month's visit. The elder Obama died in a car accident in 1982.

After her divorce, Ann Dunham married Lolo Soetoro, a Javanese surveyor from Indonesia who gained financing for graduate work through the East-West Center. The family moved to Jakarta. When Obama was ten, he returned to Hawaii under the care of his grandparents (and later his mother) for the better educational opportunities available there. He was enrolled in the fifth grade at Punahou School, a private college-preparatory school, where he was one of only six black students. Obama attended Punahou School from the 5th grade until his graduation from high school in 1979. Obama writes: "For my grandparents, my admission into Punahou Academy heralded the start of something grand, an elevation in the family status that they took great pains to let everyone know." There he met Ray (Keith Kakugawa), who introduced him to the African-American community.

Upon finishing high school, Obama moved to Los Angeles, where he enrolled at Occidental College, where he describes living a "party" lifestyle of drug and alcohol use. After two years at Occidental, he transferred to Columbia College at Columbia University, in New York City, where he majored in political science. Upon graduation, he worked for a year in business. He moved to Chicago, where he worked for a non-profit doing community organizing in the Altgeld Gardens housing project on the city's South Side. Obama recounts the difficulty of the experience, as his program faced resistance from entrenched community leaders and apathy on the part of the established bureaucracy. During this period, Obama first visited Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ, which became the center of his spiritual life. Before attending Harvard Law School, Obama decided to visit relatives in Kenya. He recounts part of this experience in the final, emotional third of the book. Obama used his memoir to reflect on his personal experiences with race and race relations in the United States.

Book cover

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

Persons in the book

With the exception of family members and a handful of public figures, Barack Obama is open in the preface about using changed names for privacy reasons and created composite characters to expedite the narrative flow. Some of his acquaintances have publicly admitted their real names, and various researchers have made suggestions as to some figures' real names:

Real life person	Referred to in the book as
Salim Al Nurridin	Rafiq
Margaret Bagby	Mona
Hasan Chandoo	Hasan
Earl Chew	Marcus
Frank Marshall Davis	Frank
Joella Edwards	Coretta
Pal Eldredge	Mr. Eldredge
Mabel Hefty	Miss Hefty
Loretta Augustine Herron	Angela
Emil Jones	Old Ward Boss
Keith Kakugawa	Ray
Jerry Kellman	Marty Kaufman
Yvonne Lloyd	Shirley
Ronald Loui / Terrence Loui (composite)	Frederick
Wilfred Mitsuji Oka	Freddy
Greg Orme	Scott
Johnnie Owens	Johnnie
Sohale Siddiqi	Sadik
Mike Ramos	Jeff
Wally Whaley	Smitty

Reception

In discussing Dreams from My Father, Toni Morrison, a Nobel Laureate novelist, has called Obama "a writer in my high esteem" and the book "quite extraordinary." She praised

"his ability to reflect on this extraordinary mesh of experiences that he has had, some familiar and some not, and to really meditate on that the way he does, and to set up scenes in narrative structure, dialogue, conversation—all of these things that you don't often see, obviously, in the routine political memoir biography. ... It's unique. It's his. There are no other ones like that."

In an interview for The Daily Beast, the author Philip Roth said he had read Dreams from My Father "with great interests," and commented that he had found it "well done and very persuasive and memorable."

The book "may be the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician," wrote Time columnist Joe Klein. In 2008, The Guardian's Rob Woodard wrote that Dreams from My Father "is easily the most honest, daring, and ambitious volume put out by a major US politician in the last 50 years." Michiko Kakutani, the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for The New York Times, described it as "the most evocative, lyrical and candid autobiography written by a future president."

The audiobook edition earned Obama the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album in 2006. Five days before being sworn in as President in 2009, Obama secured a $500,000 advance for an abridged version of Dreams from My Father for middle-school-aged children.

Time Magazine Top 100 List

In 2011, Time Magazine listed the book on its top 100 non-fiction books written in English since 1923.

Versions

• New York: Times Books; 1st edition (July 18, 1995); Hardcover: 403 pages; ISBN 0-8129-2343-X
  • This printing is very rare. Only a few signed copies are known, and are estimated to be worth up to $13,000 (depending on condition).
• New York: Kodansha International (August 1996); Paperback: 403 pages; ISBN 1-56836-162-9
• New York: Three Rivers Press; Reprint edition (August 10, 2004); Paperback: 480 pages; ISBN 1-4000-8277-3
• New York: Random House Audio; Abridged edition (May 3, 2005); Audio CD; ISBN 0-7393-2100-5; Includes the senator's speech from the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
• New York: Random House Audio; Abridged edition on Playaway digital audio player
• New York: Random House Large Print; 1st Large print edition (April 4, 2006); Hardcover: 720 pages; ISBN 0-7393-2576-0
• New York: Crown Publishers (January 9, 2007); Hardcover: 464 pages; ISBN 0-307-38341-5
• New York: Random House (January 9, 2007); eBook; ISBN 0-307-39412-3
• Melbourne: Text Publishing (2008); Paperback: 442 pages; ISBN 978-1-921351-43-3

Translations

• Arabic: Aḥlām min abī : qiṣṣat ʻirq wa-irth, translated by Hibah Najīb al-Sayyid Maghrabī; Īmān ʻAbd al-Ghanī Najm; Majdī ʻAbd al-Wāḥid ʻInabah, (2009), OCLC 460600393
• Bosnian: Snovi moga oca : priča o rasi i naslijeđu, Sarajevo : Buybook (2008), OCLC 488621036
• Chinese: The Dream Road of Obama : Yi Fu Chih Ming, translated by Yao-Hui Wang, Kuan-Lan Shih China Times Publishing Company, Taipei, Taiwan, (2008), ISBN 978-957-13-4926-8
• Croatian: Snovi mojega oca : priča o rasi i naslijeđu, (2004), ISBN 978-953-182-079-0
• Czech: Cesta za sny mého otce : jedna z nejpůsobivějších autobiografických knih o sebepoznání a hledání vlastní identity, translated by Marie Čermáková, Praha : Štrob, Širc & Slovák, (2009), ISBN 978-80-903947-6-6
• Danish: Arven fra min far : selvbiografi, Gyldendals Bogklubber, (2009), OCLC 488375191
• Dutch: Dromen van mijn vader, translated by Joost Zwart, Atlas, (2007), ISBN 978-90-450-0089-3
• Finnish: Unelmia isältäni : kertomus rodusta ja sukuperinnöstä,translated by Seppo Raudaskoski and Mika Tiirinen, (2009), ISBN 978-951-692-723-0
• French: Les rêves de mon père, translated by Paris Presses de La Cité, Paris, France, (2008), ISBN 978-2-258-07597-9
• German: Ein amerikanischer Traum, Carl Hanser Verlag (2008), ISBN 978-3-446-23021-7
• Greek, Modern: Eikones tou patera mou : he historia henos genous kai mias klēronomias, (2004), ISBN 978-960-6689-41-3
• Hebrew: חלומות מאבי (Ḥalomot me-avi), translated by Edna Shemesh, Tel Aviv, Israel, (2008), OCLC 256955212
• Hindi: Pitā se mile sapane, translated by Aśoka Kumāra, Aravinda Kumāra Pabliśarsa, Guṛagām̐va,(2009), ISBN 978-81-8452-017-0
• Indonesian: Dreams from My father : pergulatan hidup Obama, (2009), ISBN 978-979-433-544-4
• Japanese: My Dream: An autobiography of Barack Obama (マイ・ドリーム: バラク・オバマ自伝), translated by Yuya Kiuchi, Mikiko Shirakura, (2007) ISBN 978-4-478-00362-6
• Korean: Nae abŏji robutŏ ŭi kkum (내 아버지로부터의 꿈), translated by Kyŏng-sik Yi, Random House Korea, Seoul, Korea, (2007), ISBN 978-89-255-1014-9
• Marathi: Ḍrīmsa phrôma māya phādara, translated by Yamājī Mālakara and Nītā Kulakarṇī, Ameya Prakāśana, (2009), OCLC 515543205
• Persian: Ruyāhā-ye pedaram, translated by Rītū Baḥrī, (2009), ISBN 978-964-174-082-7
• Persian: Ruyāhā-ye pidaram, translated by Manīzhih Shaykh Javādī, (2009), ISBN 978-600-5253-09-2
• Polish: Odziedziczone marzenia, translated by Piotr Szymczak, (2008), ISBN 978-83-7278-333-2
• Serbian: Snovi moga oca : priča o rasi i nasleđu, translated by Vesna Džuverović; Jasna Simonović, (2008),ISBN 978-86-505-1029-2
• Spanish: Los sueños de mi padre : una historia de raza y herencia, Vintage Español, New York City, New York, (2009), ISBN 978-0-307-47387-5
• Spanish: Los sueños de mi padre : una historia de raza y herencia, translated by Fernando Miranda; Evaristo Páez Rasmussen, Granada : Almed, (2008), ISBN 978-84-936685-0-1
• Swedish: Min far hade en dröm, Albert Bonniers förlag (2008), ISBN 978-91-0-011728-3
• Thai: Bārak ʻŌbāmā : phom likhit chiwit ʻēng,translated by Nopphadon Wētsawat, Krung Thēp : Samnakphim Matichon, (2008), ISBN 978-974-02-0139-7
• Turkish: Babamdan hayaller : [ırk ve kimlik mirasının öyküsü], İstanbul : Pegasus Yayınlar (2008), ISBN 978-605-5943-32-5
• Urdu: Obāmā kī āp bītī, translated by Yāsar Javvād, (2009), OCLC 421024762
• Vietnamese: Những giấc mơ từ cha tôi, translated by Quang Nguyễn, (2008), OCLC 317713059

External links

• Barack Obama interview, 1995 August from the Connie Martinson Talks Books collection in the Claremont Colleges Digital Library
• All editions at WorldCat
• Amazon.com's book reviews and description
• Barnes & Noble's editorial reviews and overview
• OnTheIssues.org's book review and excerpts