President Barack Obama's best-selling memoir—an only-in-America story of race, class, faith, and identity.

Barack Obama’s best-selling memoir, Dreams from My Father, has enthralled so many readers with its honest and humble soul-searching, and the richness and ease of his lyrical yet unsentimental storytelling. Obama confronts his own sense of identity as the son of a black African father and white American mother, dealing with startlingly personal issues in a way that has profoundly touched so many, turning his own private odyssey into a universal one.

It opens in New York, where Obama is attending Columbia University. He learns that his father—a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man—has been killed in a car accident in Africa. Obama’s father had left the family when young Barry was two years old, and visited only once after that, when Obama was ten. Still, his sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey, first to a small town in Kansas, from which Obama 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.

Obama also takes us through his Hawaiian childhood (with a short sojourn in Indonesia after his mother’s remarriage), his first understanding of his power to lead as he speaks to an initially reluctant crowd about free speech in South Africa during his student days at Occidental College, and his struggle to find his own identity:

“Where did I belong? . . . If I had come to understand myself as a black American, and was understood as such, that understanding remained unanchored to place. What I needed was a community, I realized, a community that cut deeper than the common despair that black friends and I shared when reading the latest crime statistics or the high fives that I might exchange on a basketball court.”

When Obama was elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review in 1990, the attendant publicity led an astute editor to offer him a book contract. Dreams from My Father was published five years later to respectable reviews but not much commercial success. It was re-released after the famous 2004 Democratic Convention speech, and became a mega-bestseller.

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

“Fluidly, calmly, insightfully, Obama guides us straight to the intersection of the most serious questions of identity, class, and race.”
—Washington Post Book World

“Persuasively describes the phenomenon of belonging to two different worlds, and thus belonging to neither.”
—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