Dreams from my Father by Barack Obama

In the lead-up to the election, the conservative opponents of Barack Obama threw countless questions at him - questions regarding his birth, his upbringing, his religion and his relationships.

They demanded answers to these questions, seemingly unaware that these answers were already sitting on a shelf in their local Barnes and Noble - in the form of Barack Obama's first book, Dreams from my Father.

Written in 1995, when Obama had just been elected president of the Harvard Law Review (and his political career wasn't even conceived of) Dreams from my Father is a spectacularly candid biography that earnestly and honestly examines many of the perceived 'issues' people had with the idea of electing Obama.

The book is an education - an education all those political pundits should have availed themselves of.

Dreams from my Father is practically unique in the history of American politics. Sure, plenty of presidential candidates had written books. No less than 16 of the candidates in the 2008 Republican and Democratic primaries had political manifestos on the bookshelves of Borders and Amazon.

However, Dreams from my Father was written before Obama considered running for senator or president. That makes it uniquely free of snake-oil and slickness.

The Obama we read about in Dreams from my Father is a sharply introspective man, desperate to make sense of the confusing place he finds himself growing up in cross-cultural America.

Born of a black African and a white American, Obama describes being balanced on the knife-edge between black and white American culture.

As Obama grows up, as described in the first part of Dreams from my Father, he gravitates towards the African American community, but feels unable to integrate with them fully because he lacked the experience of growing up as a black American (he was raised by his white mother in Hawaii and Indonesia.)

He's also apprehensive of the more militant blacks he meets, who condemn white culture as the reason for their plight. This is jarring for him, as Obama's white grandparents set a great example of how tolerant and liberal white, mid-Western Americans can be.

The second part of the book explores his move to Chicago. In attempting to make a positive difference to the lives of impoverished blacks, Obama finds it difficult to swallow the liberal assumption that black poverty is reinforced by institutionalized racism.

The reality of the situation - that poverty in the inner city is at least partially perpetuated by the very people it affects - is a realization that Obama certainly didn't feel comfortable discussing with the community he was helping to 'organize.'

As the second section of the book ends, with Obama winning a place at Harvard and giving up his position as community organizer, it's clear he's become frustrated by the fact that the answers he seeks aren't black and white. Much like himself, they're a mixture of the two.

The final section of Dream from my Father is more personal, as Obama travels to his father's birthplace, Kenya, to meet his African family.

Travelling to the 'old country,' he admits that he hoped to find the answers he was seeking by embracing his African heritage. However, like everything else he describes in his book, it's not quite as simple as that.

Despite being welcomed and embraced by his enormous family, Obama's still left as the outsider. While he doesn't feel the alienation of being black in Africa, he's still on the outside, looking in, because in Kenya he's an 'American' rather than a native.

If the message of Dreams from my Father is anything, it's that there are no clear, easy and straightforward answers to anything.

During the years he described in his biography, Obama tried to embrace many different lives in order to find his 'place' in America. Ultimately, all of them came up short. Obama's American experience was not one of being 'black' or 'white' or even 'brown'. He was all of those things, yet simultaneously not 'enough' of any of them.

Even fourteen years ago, when he hadn't had the experience earned in the State or Federal Senate, it was apparent that Barack Obama was a wise, rational man who rejected polarizing ideology or blithe answers that inadequately answered life's more difficult questions.

It's that mentality, so beautifully outlined in Dreams from my Father, that make me even more confident that America's made the right choice in electing him president.