Dreams from My Father

byBarack Obama

Dreams from my father’ is a very interesting book written by the 44th president of the United States of America, Barack Obama. It talks about the issues he went through growing up, and how he dealt with them. Barack Obama was born in 1961 to a Kenyan man, and an American woman. He grew up in Hawaii, and was raised by his mother, and maternal grand parents. His father originally went back to Kenya to study for a short while, but unfortunately him and Obama’s mother divorced. Barack’s father died in a car crash in 1982, when Barack was 21 years old. He only met his father once, when he was 10 years old. This really crushed Barack and made him question a lot of things because of the absence of his father. He also dealt with racism, especially during high school, and university. An example of the racism he endured was: when he was in high school, his basketball coach called him, and other black students racial slurs, and made racist remarks on the colour of their skin. To cope with all that he had gone through, Obama turned to drugs, and alcohol. After finishing college, Barack Obama became a community organiser, and found out that many people had similar backgrounds as him, and that it was not only him that had an issue with finding his true identity. This made him want to work harder. He decided to do law, amend got accepted to Harvard university. Before he went to university, he visited his family in Kenya for the first time, and this was a very emotional part of the book because his family in Kenya saw him as one of their own, and did not discriminate him. This made him feel like he finally belonged. I would recommend this book because it is very interesting, and it makes you understand that regardless of your background, you can still become a great person.

Angel Mailu 

Rating: 5 Recommended