Book Report

Our President's first book, Dreams From My Father", is amazingly revealing as to why he thinks as he does. He generally divides it into three parts: Origins, Chicago and Kenya. Origins tells what happened to him in Hawaii and a little of Indonesia. His Chicago experience as a community organizer tells about how he struggled to be effective. He later went to Kenya to see his relatives just before he went to school at Harvard. I was struck by his outlook during his formative years. He is obsessed with the fact that he looks black and is so judged by all his associates. All relationships he has he is concerned about his blackness. The exclusive school he went to in Hawaii, even though it accecpted him, he hung around with black misfits with a grudge against whites. Even though he lives in a white home, the blackness overrules everything. He learns to swear, drink, smoke pot and complain about how the whites do not treat him and his friends well. His mother married a second time to Lolo, an Indonesian student, and they both moved to Djakarta. Lolo was a muslim, as was his real Father, a Kenyan, and it was in Indonesia that he practiced the muslim faith. His Mother gave birth to his sister while there. He left Indonesia when there were arrangements for him to attend the exclusive Hawaiian school Punahou. His Mother stayed behind with Lolo. When he got to Chicago he attached himself to a person that showed him how to be a community organizer. He spent three to four years doing this, trying to organize the neighborhood to get city hall to do something. He lived in a crummy apartment and drove broken down car. But he was driven to do something for his people. While trying to get the churches involved, he met Jherimia Wright but did not join his church until sometime later. There was something inside him that wanted to go to Keyna and visit his relatives. while ther he discovered how poor they all were. His Father was the only one that had gone to a university, the rest lived the tribal life of the Luo. While there he found three more of his Father's wives (he had four). None of them lived together, one was hated by all because she was certain that the other wives were holding out on her regarding an inheritance that Barack's Father must have had for his wives. Actually, there was no money bacause he had lost his cushy job with the government when the regime changed. All of his family hated the British because of how they had treated the African. His step-mothers had sisters and children so the clan was fairly large. Everywhere he went in Kenya all the blacks resented the whites, and his tribe resented the other tribes. The above explains why his first act as President was to remove the bust of Winston Churchill and send it back to the British. Payback for how they treated his Kenyan family.