by Barack Obama
(Nonfiction, Politics, Memoir / 480 pages)

Years before becoming the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama published this lyrical, unsentimental, and powerfully affecting memoir, which became a #1 New York Times bestseller when it was reissued in 2004. Dreams from My Father tells the story of Obama’s struggle to understand the forces that shaped him as the son of a black African father and white American mother — a struggle that takes him from the American heartland to the ancestral home of his great-aunt in the tiny African village of Alego. A searching meditation on the meaning of identity in America, Dreams from My Father might be the most revealing portrait we have of a major American leader — a man who is playing the most prominent role in healing a fractious and fragmented nation.

“Fluidly, calmly, insightfully, Obama guides us straight to the intersection of the most serious questions of identity, class, and race.” (Washington Post)