Dreams From My Father
by Barack Obama
1-time National Bestseller, Adult Nonfiction (Paperback)
- A 2024 National Bestselling Book – Adult Nonfiction (Paperback)
- 2 Time AALBC.com Bestselling Book!
- 1 Time Power List Bestselling Book
Knopf (Aug 09, 2004)
Nonfiction, Paperback, 464 pages
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Description of Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama
In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father—a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man—has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey—first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance. Pictured in lefthand photograph on cover: Habiba Akumu Hussein and Barack Obama, Sr. (President Obama’s paternal grandmother and his father as a young boy). Pictured in righthand photograph on cover: Stanley Dunham and Ann Dunham (President Obama’s maternal grandfather and his mother as a young girl).
Obama, the son of a white American mother and a black African father, writes an elegant and compelling biography that powerfully articulates America’s racial battleground and tells of his search for his place in black America.

Additional Book Information:
- ISBN: 9781400082773
- Imprint: Knopf
- Publisher: Penguin Random House
- Parent Company: Bertelsmann
Books similiar to Dreams From My Father may be found in the categories below:
- Biography & Autobiography / Cultural, Ethnic & Regional / General
- BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Memoirs
- Biography & Autobiography / Presidents & Heads Of State
- Social Science / Cultural & Ethnic Studies / American / African American & Black Studies
- Social Science / Discrimination & Race Relations
- Social Science / Minority Studies