Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
Written and Narrated By: Barack Obama
Length: 7 hrs and 8 mins
The End Notes were the best part… >Heavy Sigh<
I don’t wanna be all political cuz I don’t want you to hate me, but I admit to voting for Obama. Yes! We! Can! So it’s not like I don’t like the man… BUT…
I found Dreams from My Father to be painfully dull, and I was sooooo bored throughout a lot of it. I don’t think it was personal; I DO think, however, that perhaps, by this time, here in 2019, the story is soooooo old and sooooooo well-known that there wasn’t much new here to hold my attention.
This made me keep coming back, trying to listen with “new” ears to stories already reported by the Press over and over and over throughout the past SEVERAL years. Add to that, I didn't find Obama’s writing style to be all that scintillating, and that A LOT of it was about political struggles with all their shady (and EXASPERATING!) give-and-take shenanigans, and I snoozed off a couple of times.
The best parts of the book are when he visits relatives in Africa, but even all that got to be… EXASPERATING as his relatives are no less whiny than mine, and who needs THAT?!? His relatives are also as whiny as the people in Chicago he wants to serve, and who wants to listen to THAT also?!?
When he speaks of his childhood in Indonesia, raised by a man with definite views on how Obama’s mother “just doesn’t understand” people? Well, it kinda made me cringe to hear it. ‘Twould appear there wasn’t a whole lot of respect to be found for his mother, a woman with a warm heart and all, but the way it’s written makes it seem that there wasn’t a good deal of common sense within her at the same time. Which is sad. But in an “honest” autobiography, I s’pose the truth is sometimes unfortunate.
Barack narrates this well enough, but he does turn some of the people in the story into caricatures. There’s the fast-talking, wheedling, community activist. There’s the fast-talking, reactionary, college friend. There are fast-talking, conniving, politicians galore. And there are fast-talking, confused but demanding, relatives coming out of the woodwork as well. There’s a lot of fast-talking here (Or maybe it was just that I kept messing with the Play Speed as I wanted to get it over with? My bad…!).
The BEST part of the whole audiobook comes riiiiiiiight at the end with Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention when he was sooooo unknown but when his words were ABSOLUTELY ENERGIZING!!! Ya gotta admit it: Okay, the book was kinda boring. But that speech!!!!
Worth the price of admission!
Okay, so I expected more about his father, but I think I got the gist of it enough. Obama senior was a complex man with unfortunate flaws. And he left his son a tangled legacy of race, dedication to the future, and a desire to strive for more. Still, when you listen to what the man was like, you come away from the book thanking GOD that Barack was raised mostly by his grandparents!
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