My Father's Dreams: A Story of Race and Heritage

“Dreams of My Father” is the first book by Barack Obama, who at the time of its publication in 1995 was known only as a public figure and the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. It is to this fact, or rather, to the interest of publishers in Obama caused by this fact, that Barack Obama owes his literary debut, and the book owes its specific, “ordered,” focus on his biography.

This rather detailed account of the young years of the future politician, and later the US president, is a very atypical, far from stereotyped story of a black American: childhood in a white family of a mother and studying at a prestigious school, life in distant exotic Indonesia, and therefore - from an early age - familiarity with very different societies, openness to life in very different layers of society, a long and exhausting history of relations with his father, a trip to Kenya, meeting and accepting the African part of his family.

However, paradoxically, this is a universal story about the challenges of modernization and family trauma, colonialism and loneliness, in which Ukrainian readers can see much more of the familiar, painful, mourned and hotly discussed than one might expect from an American author.