Writing a memoir can be a dicey thing, doubly so when the author of the memoir is around 30 years old as Barack Obama was when he wrote “Dreams from My Father.” Your typical 30 year-old hasn’t lived enough life to justify penning an autobiography, and any remotely self-aware 30 year-old knows this. Obama certainly did; his modesty is apparent on every page.
A present-day review of “Dreams of My Father” should tackle two separate issues. First, the book ought to be judged on its own merits. Next, since it’s the question that's probably on everyone’s mind, the book should be looked at from the perspective of what it might tell us about its author who, 12 years after writing it, is a top tier contender for president.
AS FOR THE BOOK ITSELF, it falls somewhere in the fair-to-good range. There’s no doubt that Obama writes very well for a politician. But that’s faint praise, the rough equivalent of saying that a house pet plays volleyball very well for a golden retriever. As we are painfully aware, politicians seldom read books, let alone write them.
In truth, Obama writes only okay for a writer. Often, his prose drifts dangerously close to a needlessly purple territory. He describes the onset of a Chicago winter by pronouncing, “Winter came and the city turned monochrome – black trees against gray sky above white earth. Night now fell in mid-afternoon, especially when the snowstorms rolled in, boundless prairie storms that set the sky close to the ground, the city lights reflected against the clouds.”
Such excerpts may leave some readers screaming, “Poetry!” Me, I was closer to screaming, “Get to the point!” Such florid passages litter virtually every page. And there are 444 such pages, primarily because there was no detail so pedestrian that Obama declined to spend a clichéd paragraph or two describing it. This book should have been half as long as it was.
But Obama’s life is definitely a good story, and he certainly has a keen writer’s eye. While he does spend a lot of time on prosaic details, he also sees the telling details. The book’s main problem is more one of authorial discipline and editing than anything else. The details regarding his grandparents were fascinating; the details of wind whipping off the lake less so.
“Dreams from My Father” traces Obama’s unique background and upbringing. His father was a Kenyan who got a PhD. from Harvard, and met Obama only for a brief time when his son was ten. Obama spent formative years in Hawaii, Indonesia, Chicago and Harvard. His parents between them had I think 7 spouses. (I lost count during one of the extended passages describing a tree or something.) He was also partly raised by his maternal grandparents, white natives of Kansas who moved to Hawaii and accepted and loved their bi-racial grandson unconditionally.
Objectively speaking, it’s an interesting saga. For a young guy, Obama had a wealth of unusual experiences. What we don’t ever get from the book is a sense of the author. While ostensibly the book is the story of his life and he is indeed present in every scene, he’s seldom more than a witness. It’s always someone else doing the talking, someone else acting, someone else stirring deep thoughts in the author.
We get no understanding of how the self-described pot-head high school student that Obama was transformed himself into such a successful young man. By the time Obama was commissioned to write “Dreams From My Father,” he had graduated Harvard Law School magna cum laude and been the first black managing editor of the school’s Law Review. These are both magnificent accomplishments, yet accomplishments that he neither mentions in the book nor explains how he made them happen.
The book starts out strong. By the last part where he visits Kenya and meets family members he had never known, it has long since become draggy. Though the author is the protagonist, we learn little about him; Obama was apparently reluctant to write about himself. We hear about few of his actions, and we get a look at even less of his thoughts. Because the protagonist remains a cipher who neither does nor thinks anything, the book has no narrative thrust.
Thus, in the end, the book disappoints. It could have been a fascinating story of self-discovery and accomplishment. Instead, it is an ultimately exhausting recollection of Obama’s many varied family members and acquaintances. Some of the anecdotes are interesting. But for a book to maintain its momentum for over 400 pages, it needs some uniting narrative thread. This is what “Dreams from My Father” lacks.
SO WHAT DOES “Dreams from My Father” tell us about the man who would be president? Not much, I’m afraid. If you’re looking for any bombshells about his personal life, you’ll be disappointed. He does confess to smoking weed and snorting cocaine while in high school, but I don’t imagine those revelations will be a factor in the campaign to come. For what it’s worth, the passages about his time in an Indonesian madrass should end any controversy about his religious identity: Obama is not, nor has he ever been, a Muslim.
What struck me about this book is how modest an effort it was for a future politician. Throughout the book, we get the picture of Obama as a supremely talented but ultimately passive guy. Stuff just seems to happen to him. Some of this is really interesting stuff, like being born to parents who each went through multiple spouses and left Obama with half-siblings scattered across the earth. But it’s almost a little disconcerting that Obama didn’t trace his path from Hawaii to Occidental College to Harvard Law to managing editor of the Law Review.
One thing that was crystal clear from his book that Obama has a unique ability to serve as a vessel for the ambitions and dreams of others. Whether it was his grandparents or his mother or his far-flung African family, they all had a lot invested in their hopes for “Barry.” Suffused in the book was the unstated fact that Obama has an innate characteristic that makes others project their dreams onto him.
Interestingly, on Sunday the New York Times ran a story on Obama’s time at Harvard Law, a subject that both “Dreams from My Father” and Obama’s more recent “The Audacity of Hope” hardly addressed. I found this passage telling:
People had a way of hearing what they wanted in Mr. Obama’s words. Earlier, after a long, tortured discussion about whether it was better to be called “black” or “African-American,” Mr. Obama dismissed the question, saying semantics did not matter as much as real-life issues, recalled Cassandra Butts, still a close friend. According to Mr. Ogletree, students on each side of the debate thought he was endorsing their side. “Everyone was nodding, Oh, he agrees with me,” he said.
Having read Obama’s first book, I’m convinced that this trait has been the key to his political success to date. Others invest their hopes in him, and he rides their investment to victory. In many ways Obama is a pedestrian and orthodox politician; no grand plans or displays of leadership have marked his public life. His ideology is the most hackneyed form of liberalism, the kind that stopped being progressive over a generation ago.
In some ways, Obama almost seems like an accidental presidential candidate. His Senate seat was almost bequeathed to him; his top-tier presidential status was definitely bequeathed to him. On paper, there is nothing that this man has done that would make you say, “He should be president.”
I’ve come away from reading “Dreams From My Father” feeling that Obama is probably a good man, definitely a magnificently gifted man, but also a passive man. The latter characteristic will be his undoing in presidential politics. Bill Clinton was also magnificently gifted. But were it not for his hunger, drive and willingness to do whatever it took to get what he wanted, Clinton never would have become president.
There may be accidental Senators, but no one gets accidentally elected president.
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