I have long been following Barak Obama’s news, having had the hope he would become the president of United States. Even though I’m a non-American I believe studying Obama means studying how the world’s superpower is going to be led. I have been reading dozens of articles about him since I have gotten to be familiar with his name when I first came to the States in 2006. I even remember writing a story for my “Journalism and Politics” class about his decision of announcing his presidential candidacy for 2008. I have also watched TV programs and listened to interviews with and about him on the radio. These have all hooked me up to support him for a better America and hopefully a better world.
However, studying Obama politically is not enough. I felt I needed to study his personal life as well. Thus, and three days after he was elected to be the president, I headed to the nearest bookstore in downtown Washington DC where I go to work and bought his infamous memoir Dreams from My Father. I wanted to see why millions of people around the world, including me, fell in love with this man’s character.
The book sat on my bookcase for a few weeks because I was reading another book I needed to finish, a habit I don’t think I will change. I can’t read a new book unless I finish the one I have in hands. Some of my friends read three books at a time. Anyways, I started reading it recently and lived with Barak Obama the person, his life from childhood to adulthood and marriage.
Legendary Toni Morisson called Obama “a writer in my high esteem” and the book “quite extraordinary.” Indeed, it is an extraordinary account of life. Even though I loved Obama’s political accomplishments, I have never expected him to be such a great writer. His literary style chilled my entire spine with details portrayed with emotions and metaphors not any writer can master.
Every time I read about one of the characters in Obama’s life I feel I got to know him or her. His grandparents, mother, sisters and brothers. I loved how he talked about his sister Kenyan sister, Auma. She reminded me of my sister and how greatly she loves me and cares about me. The brother-sister relationship between the two of them was greatly discussed in the book, despite the fact that they lived oceans away.
As for his achievements, I should no longer be surprised that this man has become the president of the US. His will and strength when he was young and when he started off as a community organizer made me respect him a lot more. He did what no one in the African American Chicago community was able to do. Above all, he believed in what he was doing. He believed it was a good cause that needed to be addressed and dealt with, not ignored.
Throughout the book, Obama was brave enough to talk about what he was really going through as an American with African roots, what his father meant to him, how his relatives lived when Obama Sr. was alive and after his death, his brothers and sisters solidarity in hard times, and how after all of that he was awarded with his wife Michelle and how at the wedding he felt “the luckiest man alive.”
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