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.
