I wonder how many of the commenters here have read “Dreams From My Father”. I did, and was blown away by its frankness, eloquence, and humanity. It was not written by a politician — it was written by a young man who had had an interesting life up to then (and who therefore had been approached by a publisher to write a memoir), and represents his attempts to make sense of himself.
A lot of the book is about his father, and his race. Bawer sees this as discouraging, that he is slighting his white relatives and obsessed with race. I’d say that it’s perfectly natural for a young person to be especially interested in the things that are missing in their lives, and for Obama that was his father and an easy racial identity. He has made clear, in the new introduction to “Dreams” and in speeches and interviews, his love for his mother and her parents, and his gratitude for everything they gave him. They gave him everything, but they could not tell him how to be a black man in America — that part he had to figure out himself.
