Dreams From My Father
by Barack Obama
Canongate pounds 12.99
Is America ready for a black President? That's the question exercising the US political class this summer. More specifically, is America ready to elect Barack Obama to the White House in 2008? The opinion polls favour Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, but seasoned election-watchers will tell you that the only polls that matter will be the primaries at the beginning of next year. At the moment of writing, Obama's chances are probably no worse than John F Kennedy's in 1959. Meanwhile, in the ongoing presidential lottery, Canongate is betting heavily on Obama's No 1 bestseller, a book actually written 10 years ago when Obama was just 33, and long before he had any thoughts of a political career. In fact, he was still at law school.
Dreams From My Father is a remarkable story, beautifully told, and inspired by its author's divided family history. The son of a black African farmer from Kenya and a white American mother from the Midwest, Obama was two years old when his father walked out on the family. Years later, after many vicissitudes, Obama received a call from Nairobi to say that his father had been killed in a car crash.
This news triggered a quest in which Obama sought to discover the truth about his father, in the process becoming reconciled to his troubled inheritance. Travelling to Kansas, Hawaii and finally Kenya, Obama undertook a journey of heart and mind into a family maelstrom of identity, class and race.
Many American reviews of Dreams From My Father singled out the exceptional grace of Obama's prose, its honesty and freshness. Consciously or not, Obama has placed his book in a literary tradition of political prose that goes back to another master of the American language: Abraham Lincoln (Obama is the senator from Illinois, Lincoln's home state).
Who knows how black America will respond to Obama at the polling booth. But it's a fair bet that this account of one man's search for meaning in his life as a black American will hardly do its author any harm. And if Obama makes it to the White House, his publishers will certainly celebrate an inspired wager.