Dreams from My Father
Dreams from My Father

Author: Barack Obama

Publisher: Crown

Published: 2007-01-09

Total Pages: 463

ISBN-13: 0307394123

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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • ONE OF ESSENCE’S 50 MOST IMPACTFUL BLACK BOOKS OF THE PAST 50 YEARS In this iconic memoir of his early days, Barack Obama “guides us straight to the intersection of the most serious questions of identity, class, and race” (The Washington Post Book World). “Quite extraordinary.”—Toni Morrison 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. Praise for Dreams from My Father “Beautifully crafted . . . moving and candid . . . This book belongs on the shelf beside works like James McBride’s The Color of Water and Gregory Howard Williams’s Life on the Color Line as a tale of living astride America’s racial categories.”—Scott Turow “Provocative . . . Persuasively describes the phenomenon of belonging to two different worlds, and thus belonging to neither.”—The New York Times Book Review “Obama’s writing is incisive yet forgiving. This is a book worth savoring.”—Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here “One of the most powerful books of self-discovery I’ve ever read, all the more so for its illuminating insights into the problems not only of race, class, and color, but of culture and ethnicity. It is also beautifully written, skillfully layered, and paced like a good novel.”—Charlayne Hunter-Gault, author of In My Place “Dreams from My Father is an exquisite, sensitive study of this wonderful young author’s journey into adulthood, his search for community and his place in it, his quest for an understanding of his roots, and his discovery of the poetry of human life. Perceptive and wise, this book will tell you something about yourself whether you are black or white.”—Marian Wright Edelman

Barack Obama’s Literary Legacy
Barack Obama’s Literary Legacy

Author: Richard Purcell

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 2016-02-15

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 9781137501523

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President Barack Obama's Dreams of My Father (1995) and The Audacity of Hope (2006) have received positive and extensive critical attention from both professional reviewers and University scholars. While literary intellectuals have praised Obama's memoirs for the style in which he composed them, social scientists and partisan political analysts have thus far generally monopolized discussion of President Obama's writings. Yet there has been a recent surge of interest in the literary merits of Obama's writings. Our volume understands "literary" to indicate a host of a priori relationships that successful, artful writing brings to the surface of a written work. These are instantiated in narrative form, thereby revealing what Edward W. Said famously defined as the "worldliness" of the literary object. In the case of President Obama's writings, and Dreams from My Father in particular, those relationships are evident in the author's negotiation of literary tradition, rhetorical modes and historical narratives. By positioning the "literary" at this vantage, at the point where writing and the world converge, the volume's contributors assert the indispensable, and urgent, import of understanding the President not only in political terms, but, more importantly, in literary terms that place him within a long tradition of American literary-political authorship.

A Singular Woman
A Singular Woman

Author: Janny Scott

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2011-05-03

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 110151390X

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From the author of The Beneficiary: Fortune, Misfortune and the Story of My Father comes a major publishing event: an unprecedented look into the life of the woman who most singularly shaped Barack Obama-his mother. Barack Obama has written extensively about his father, but little is known about Stanley Ann Dunham, the fiercely independent woman who raised him, the person he credits for, as he says, "what is best in me." Here is the missing piece of the story. Award-winning reporter Janny Scott interviewed nearly two hundred of Dunham's friends, colleagues, and relatives (including both her children), and combed through boxes of personal and professional papers, letters to friends, and photo albums, to uncover the full breadth of this woman's inspiring and untraditional life, and to show the remarkable extent to which she shaped the man Obama is today. Dunham's story moves from Kansas and Washington state to Hawaii and Indonesia. It begins in a time when interracial marriage was still a felony in much of the United States, and culminates in the present, with her son as our president- something she never got to see. It is a poignant look at how character is passed from parent to child, and offers insight into how Obama's destiny was created early, by his mother's extraordinary faith in his gifts, and by her unconventional mothering. Finally, it is a heartbreaking story of a woman who died at age fifty-two, before her son would go on to his greatest accomplishments and reflections of what she taught him.

The 100 Best Nonfiction Books of All Time
The 100 Best Nonfiction Books of All Time

Author: Robert McCrum

Publisher:

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781903385838

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Beginning in 1611 with the King James Bible and ending in 2014 with Elizabeth Kolbert's 'The Sixth Extinction', this extraordinary voyage through the written treasures of our culture examines universally-acclaimed classics such as Pepys' 'Diaries', Charles Darwin's 'The Origin of Species', Stephen Hawking's 'A Brief History of Time' and a whole host of additional works --

Barack Obama
Barack Obama

Author: David Maraniss

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2012-06-19

Total Pages: 773

ISBN-13: 1439167532

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The groundbreaking multigenerational biography, a richly textured account of President Obama and the forces that shaped him and sustain him, from Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter, political commentator, and acclaimed biographer David Maraniss. In Barack Obama: The Story, David Maraniss has written a deeply reported generational biography teeming with fresh insights and revealing information, a masterly narrative drawn from hundreds of interviews, including with President Obama in the Oval Office, and a trove of letters, journals, diaries, and other documents. The book unfolds in the small towns of Kansas and the remote villages of western Kenya, following the personal struggles of Obama’s white and black ancestors through the swirl of the twentieth century. It is a roots story on a global scale, a saga of constant movement, frustration and accomplishment, strong women and weak men, hopes lost and deferred, people leaving and being left. Disparate family threads converge in the climactic chapters as Obama reaches adulthood and travels from Honolulu to Los Angeles to New York to Chicago, trying to make sense of his past, establish his own identity, and prepare for his political future. Barack Obama: The Story chronicles as never before the forces that shaped the first black president of the United States and explains why he thinks and acts as he does. Much like the author’s classic study of Bill Clinton, First in His Class, this promises to become a seminal book that will redefine a president.

Change We Can Believe In
Change We Can Believe In

Author: Obama for Change

Publisher: Crown

Published: 2008-09-08

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 0307460460

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At this defining moment in our history, Americans are hungry for change. After years of failed policies and failed politics from Washington, this is our chance to reclaim the American dream. Barack Obama has proven to be a new kind of leader–one who can bring people together, be honest about the challenges we face, and move this nation forward. Change We Can Believe In outlines his vision for America. In these pages you will find bold and specific ideas about how to fix our ailing economy and strengthen the middle class, make health care affordable for all, achieve energy independence, and keep America safe in a dangerous world. Change We Can Believe In asks you not just to believe in Barack Obama’s ability to bring change to Washington, it asks you to believe in yours.

The Beautiful Struggle (Adapted for Young Adults)
The Beautiful Struggle (Adapted for Young Adults)

Author: Ta-Nehisi Coates

Publisher: Ember

Published: 2022-01-11

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 1984894056

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Adapted from the adult memoir by the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Water Dancer and Between the World and Me, this father-son story explores how boys become men, and quite specifically, how Ta-Nehisi Coates became Ta-Nehisi Coates. As a child, Ta-Nehisi Coates was seen by his father, Paul, as too sensitive and lacking focus. Paul Coates was a Vietnam vet who'd been part of the Black Panthers and was dedicated to reading and publishing the history of African civilization. When it came to his sons, he was committed to raising proud Black men equipped to deal with a racist society, during a turbulent period in the collapsing city of Baltimore where they lived. Coates details with candor the challenges of dealing with his tough-love father, the influence of his mother, and the dynamics of his extended family, including his brother "Big Bill," who was on a very different path than Ta-Nehisi. Coates also tells of his family struggles at school and with girls, making this a timely story to which many readers will relate.

Deconstructing Obama
Deconstructing Obama

Author: Jack Cashill

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2011-02-15

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 1451611137

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Did Obama write his own books and is the story they tell true? “I've written two books,” Barack Obama told a crowd of teachers in July of 2008. “I actually wrote them myself.” The teachers exploded in laughter. They got the joke: lesser politicians were not bright enough to do the same. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama supporters pointed to the first of those two books, the 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, as proof of Obama’s superior intellect. Time magazine called Dreams “the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician.” The Obama campaign machine traded on the candidate’s literary reputation, encouraging volunteers to “get out the vote and keep talking to others about the genius of Barack Obama.” There was just one small flaw, as writer and literary detective Jack Cashill discovered months before the November 2008 election: nothing in Obama’s history suggested he was capable of writing either Dreams or his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope. In fact, as Cashill continued his research, he came to the shocking conclusion that the real craftsman behind Dreams was terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers. “This was a charge,” David Remnick admits in his definitive Obama biography, The Bridge, “that if ever proved true, or believed to be true among enough voters, could have been the end of the candidacy.” Deconstructing Obama tells the story of what happens when a citizen journalist discovers a game-changing reality that the media refuse to acknowledge. Despite their rejection, Cashill expanded his research into Obama’s literary canon. As he came to see, if Dreams serves as sacred text, the poem “Pop” is the Rosetta stone, the key to deciphering Obama’s shrouded past, his fragile psyche, and his uniquely cryptic political life. In unlocking that past, Cashill discovered that the story that Obama has been telling all his life varies from the true story in ways big and small. In fact, much of Obama’s life story appears to be a wholly constructed fabrication, one that Jack Cashill “deconstructs” to show the world just who Barack Obama really is.

The Audacity of Hope
The Audacity of Hope

Author: Barack Obama

Publisher: Crown

Published: 2006-10-17

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 0307382095

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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Barack Obama’s lucid vision of America’s place in the world and call for a new kind of politics that builds upon our shared understandings as Americans, based on his years in the Senate “In our lowdown, dispiriting era, Obama’s talent for proposing humane, sensible solutions with uplifting, elegant prose does fill one with hope.”—Michael Kazin, The Washington Post In July 2004, four years before his presidency, Barack Obama electrified the Democratic National Convention with an address that spoke to Americans across the political spectrum. One phrase in particular anchored itself in listeners’ minds, a reminder that for all the discord and struggle to be found in our history as a nation, we have always been guided by a dogged optimism in the future, or what Obama called “the audacity of hope.” The Audacity of Hope is Barack Obama’s call for a different brand of politics—a politics for those weary of bitter partisanship and alienated by the “endless clash of armies” we see in congress and on the campaign trail; a politics rooted in the faith, inclusiveness, and nobility of spirit at the heart of “our improbable experiment in democracy.” He explores those forces—from the fear of losing to the perpetual need to raise money to the power of the media—that can stifle even the best-intentioned politician. He also writes, with surprising intimacy and self-deprecating humor, about settling in as a senator, seeking to balance the demands of public service and family life, and his own deepening religious commitment. At the heart of this book is Barack Obama’s vision of how we can move beyond our divisions to tackle concrete problems. He examines the growing economic insecurity of American families, the racial and religious tensions within the body politic, and the transnational threats—from terrorism to pandemic—that gather beyond our shores. And he grapples with the role that faith plays in a democracy—where it is vital and where it must never intrude. Underlying his stories is a vigorous search for connection: the foundation for a radically hopeful political consensus. Only by returning to the principles that gave birth to our Constitution, Obama says, can Americans repair a political process that is broken, and restore to working order a government that has fallen dangerously out of touch with millions of ordinary Americans. Those Americans are out there, he writes—“waiting for Republicans and Democrats to catch up with them.”