Obama Presidency News » Inheritance

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

admin — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 20:41:07 +0000

In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his fatherâ��a figure he knows more as a myth than as a manâ��has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odysseyâ��first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his motherâ��s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his fatherâ��s life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance. Pictured in lefthand photograph on cover: Habiba Akumu Hussein and Barack Obama, Sr. (President Obama's paternal grandmother and his father as a young boy). Pictured in righthand photograph on cover: Stanley Dunham and Ann Dunham (President Obama's maternal grandfather and his mother as a young girl).

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

admin — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 22:54:54 +0000

Sale Price:$17.72

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

admin — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 23:28:00 +0000

Sale Price:$13.12

The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power

admin — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 02:52:53 +0000

Readers of The New York Times know David Sanger as one of the most trusted correspondents in Washington, one to whom presidents, secretaries of state, and foreign leaders talk with unusual candor. Now, with a historianâ��s sweep and an insiderâ��s eye for telling detail, Sanger delivers an urgent intelligence briefing on the world America faces. In a riveting narrative, The Inheritance describes the huge costs of distraction and lost opportunities at home and abroad as Iraq soaked up manpower, money, and intelligence capabilities. The 2008 market collapse further undermined American leadership, leaving the new president with a set of challenges unparalleled since Franklin D. Roosevelt entered the Oval Office.Sanger takes readers into the White House Situation Room to reveal how Washington penetrated Tehranâ��s nuclear secrets, leading President Bush, in his last year, to secretly step up covert actions in a desperate effort to delay an Iranian bomb. Meanwhile, his intelligence chiefs made repeated secret missions to Pakistan as they tried to stem a growing insurgency and cope with an ally who was also aiding the enemyâ��while receiving billions in American military aid. Now the new president faces critical choices: Is it better to learn to live with a nuclear Iran or risk overt or covert confrontation? Is it worth sending U.S. forces deep into Pakistani territory at the risk of undermining an unstable Pakistani government sitting on a nuclear arsenal? It is a race against time and against a new effort by Islamic extremistsâ��never before disclosedâ��to quietly infiltrate Pakistanâ��s nuclear weapons program. â��Bush wrote a lot of checks,â�� one senior intelligence official told Sanger, â��that the next president is going to have to cash.â��The Inheritance takes readers to Afghanistan, where Bush never delivered on his promises for a Marshall Plan to rebuild the country, paving the way for the Talibanâ��s return. It examines the chilling calculus of North Koreaâ��s Kim Jong-Il, who built actual weapons of mass destruction in the same months that the Bush administration pursued phantoms in Iraq, then sold his nuclear technology in the Middle East in an operation the American intelligence apparatus missed. And it explores how China became one of the real winners of the Iraq war, using the past eight years to expand its influence in Asia, and lock up oil supplies in Africa while Washington was bogged down in the Middle East. Yet Sanger, a former foreign correspondent in Asia, sees enormous potential for the next administration to forge a partnership with Beijing on energy and the environment. At once a secret history of our foreign policy misadventures and a lucid explanation of the opportunities they create, The Inheritance is vital reading for anyone trying to understand the extraordinary challenges that lie ahead.From the Hardcover edition.

Dreams From My Father – A Story Of Race And Inheritance, Revised Edition

admin — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 05:50:26 +0000

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

admin — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 06:47:05 +0000

Nine years before the Senate campaign that made him one of the most influential and compelling voices in American politics, 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 Obamaâ��s struggle to understand the forces that shaped him as the son of a black African father and white American motherâ��a struggle that takes him from the American heartland to the ancestral home of his great-aunt in the tiny African village of Alego. Obama opens his story in New York, where he hears that his fatherâ��a figure he knows more as a myth than as a manâ��has died in a car accident. The news triggers a chain of memories as Barack retraces his familyâ��s unusual history: the migration of his motherâ��s family from small-town Kansas to the Hawaiian islands; the love that develops between his mother and a promising young Kenyan student, a love nurtured by youthful innocence and the integrationist spirit of the early sixties; his fatherâ��s departure from Hawaii when Barack was two, as the realities of race and power reassert themselves; and Barackâ��s own awakening to the fears and doubts that exist not just between the larger black and white worlds but within himself.Propelled by a desire to understand both the forces that shaped him and his fatherâ��s legacy, Barack moves to Chicago to work as a community organizer. There, against the backdrop of tumultuous political and racial conflict, he works to turn back the mounting despair of the inner city. His story becomes one with those of the people he works with as he learns about the value of community, the necessity of healing old wounds, and the possibility of faith in the midst of adversity.Barackâ��s journey comes full circle in Kenya, where he finally meets the African side of his family and confronts the bitter truth of his fatherâ��s life. Traveling through a country racked by brutal poverty and tribal conflict, but whose people are sustained by a spirit of endurance and hope, Barack discovers that he is inescapably bound to brothers and sisters living an ocean awayâ��and that by embracing their common struggles he can finally reconcile his divided inheritance.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 leaderâ��a man who is playing, and will play, an increasingly prominent role in healing a fractious and fragmented nation. Pictured in lefthand photograph on cover: Habiba Akumu Hussein and Barack Obama, Sr. (President Obama's paternal grandmother and his father as a young boy). Pictured in righthand photograph on cover: Stanley Dunham and Ann Dunham (President Obama's maternal grandfather and his mother as a young girl).

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (Paperback)

admin — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 17:45:22 +0000

From Publishers Weekly
Elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama was offered a book contract, but the intellectual journey he planned to recount became instead this poignant, probing memoir of an unusual life. Born in 1961 to a white American woman and a black Kenyan student, Obama was reared in Hawaii by his mother and her parents, his father having left for further study and a return home to Africa. So Obama's not-unhappy youth is nevertheless a lonely voy (more...)