Dreams from my Father

I am now reading “Dreams from my Father” by Barack Obama. He begins with a short biography about his grandparents intertwined with the story of his own life. His father’s death begins the story. He talks about his life in Indonesia, and Hawaii and all the while, he talks about race. He enters a school where he and one girl are the only African Americans. That is the obvious theme in this book: race. But there is also a theme of afterlife: the way people treat family members after their death.

The book opens up with Obama living in the city where he talks about his father. He gets a call saying that he is dead and then thinks about all of the stories that his grandparents and mother have told about him. Because of this, he says that he thinks of his father as “more of a myth than a man.” This is a very good example of the portrayal of the dead. His father left him when he was young, so, at least to me, it hardly made a difference to Obama whether his father was alive or not. His mother and Grandparents are portraying him better than he actually was, and I think that this happens a lot. Many people are upset and don’t want to hurt the dead’s feelings, so they portray them better than they were. I do not approve of this because it gives the incorrect characteristics to children who may never have met the person.

The whole idea of the book is actually kind of creepy in the way that I know so much about the personal life of our president. I know everything that he was thinking when he was younger, and I know what his life was like as a child and in college. Why do some presidents write books about themselves, about their private lives? Well, I think that some of it has to do with their legacy. Obama hopes that America will remember him not only as a good leader, but also as a good person and role model. I definitely respect him more from the knowledge of his life that I have gathered from the book. I think that he wants his book to have this effect on people. He wants to increase his publicity so that after he has ceased to exist, he will be well remembered as an important part of American history.

The biography of Barack Obama, “Dreams from my Father”, is a well told story that is about race, but also leads to issues about death. The legacy of his father is not that great, at least to Obama, and the purpose of the book, in some ways, is to create lasting memories of Obama.