BuzzFlash Reviews

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Obama's recent 25 million dollars raised in three months moves him into the heavyweight category as far as political prognosticators are concerned. No one expected him to equal Hillary's take in the first major fundraising benchmark of the 2008 primary campaign.

But what makes Barack Obama tick?

This paperback edition of his much-lauded memoir introduces a reflective, skilled writer. Obama is the opposite of George W. Bush in that Bush is an empty vessel of cliched posturing, devoid of self-reflection and proud of it.

Obama, on the other hand, sees life as a journey. Long before he entered history when he spoke at the 2004 Democratic Convention, Obama did an unusual thing for someone who would become a nationally viable politician: he looked inside himself, his past, and wrote his own memoir.

No ghost writers here, just Barack Obama exploring how he came to be the person whom he is.

�Provocative . . . Persuasively describes the phenomenon of belonging to two different worlds, and thus belonging to neither.�
�New York Times Book Review

�Fluidly, calmly, insightfully, Obama guides us straight to the intersection of the most serious questions of identity, class, and race.�
�Washington Post Book World

�Beautifully crafted . . . moving and candid . . . this book belongs on the shelf beside works like James McBride�s The Color of Water and Gregory Howard Williams�s Life on the Color Line as a tale of living astride America�s racial categories.� �Scott Turow

�Obama�s writing is incisive yet forgiving. This is a book worth savoring.�
�Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here


From Booklist:

Obama argues with himself on almost every page of this lively autobiographical conversation. He gets you to agree with him, and then he brings in a counternarrative that seems just as convincing. Son of a white American mother and of a black Kenyan father whom he never knew, Obama grew up mainly in Hawaii. After college, he worked for three years as a community organizer on Chicago's South Side. Then, finally, he went to Kenya, to find the world of his dead father, his "authentic" self. Will the truth set you free, Obama asks? Or will it disappoint? Both, it seems.

His search for himself as a black American is rooted in the particulars of his daily life; it also reads like a wry commentary about all of us. He dismisses stereotypes of the "tragic mulatto" and then shows how much we are all caught between messy contradictions and disparate communities. He discovers that Kenya has 400 different tribes, each of them with stereotypes of the others. Obama is candid about racism and poverty and corruption, in Chicago and in Kenya. Yet he does find community and authenticity, not in any romantic cliche, but with "honest, decent men and women who have attainable ambitions and the determination to see them through."

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