Book : "Dreams From My Father", by Barack Obama

This is an important book. It is not a presidential or even a political memoir, as it was written in 1995, 14 years before Barack Obama became President of the United States. It is, rather, an enlightening and moving insight into the black liberal experience in America and, of course, into the deepest parts of the now President's political and emotional psyche. Obama, then newly appointed as the first African-American president of the prestigious Harvard Law Review, bares his innermost feelings about his ambitions, race, inheritance and family as he traces his story and, in particular, his deepest roots in Kenya.

As a white European liberal, I confess reading this book was a revelatory experience. It is the first time I have truly understood the relentless burden that being black in America (or Europe, for that matter) represents: burden as oppression and burden as expectation. Not only is his mind crystal clear - and his writing both direct and breathtakingly poetic - but he also has the analytical advantage of coming to understand his heritage and place in American society as an outsider to the average black and white American cultures. He grew up with his white mother and ever loyal grandparents but his yearning was always for a solid relationship with his absent Kenyan father, a feckless and embittered dreamer who never really faced up to his familial responsibilities.

Obama's unassuming honesty is in many ways the most moving aspect of the story. At no time does he fall into sentimentality, simplistic analysis or self-justification. His description of his youthful dabbling with drugs, casual sex and radical politics and the consequent struggle to develop self-discipline and determination is unostentatiously open and heartening.  His longed-for trip to Kenya to meet his extended family in Africa neither extinguishes nor resolves his confusion about his heritage. Somehow, despite his wildly disjointed upbringing, he emerges from his search for identity as someone supremely at ease with himself, questioning his beliefs but not doubting who he is. In the end, he concludes that he is what he has created not what he has inherited. He is truly grown up - which cannot be said of either of his two immediate predecessors.

Most of all, Dreams of My Father, written without political intent or marketing spin, shows us beyond doubt that the US Presidency is, at long last, in the hands of a good, deeply intelligent and cultured man, driven in a human and unsaintly way only by the wish to do good and achieve great things for his country and his people, of all races. History will record whether he succeeds.