Dreams from My Father
Written before he was a senator, before anyone knew who he was, this is a remarkably psychologically honest memoir by an American political figure. Obama's exploration of race, identity, Kenya, Hawaii, and Chicago is genuinely literary and genuinely brave.
The Hawaii and Indonesia childhood reads flat and reported, and one reader found the prose “so full of cliches that I almost threw it against the wall.” The Chicago organising section draws the most consistent fatigue, with “scenes and stories too drawn out,” the “same topic over and over again,” and a voice that “veered uncomfortably into self-indulgent navel-gazing” A recurring pushback is that “he only saw his father maybe twice in the whole book” while the mother and grandparents who raised him get less. The consequential complaint is his own: the introduction concedes composite characters and a compressed timeline, and a Chicago columnist wrote at the time that “it is impossible to tell who is real and who is not,” a later biographer calling it “a work of historical fiction.” Even admirers suspect “the purpose of the book was to brandish his reputation.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
