The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream

by Barack Obama • 1995

Before Barack Obama became a politician he was, among other things, a writer. Dreams from My Father is his masterpiece: a refreshing, revealing portrait of a young man asking the big questions about identity and belonging. The son of a black African father and a white American mother, Obama recounts an emotional odyssey. He retraces the migration of his mother’s family from Kansas to Hawaii, then to his childhood home in Indonesia. Finally he travels to Kenya, where he confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life and at last reconciles his divided inheritance.