Dreams from My Father

A Story of Race and Inheritance

By: Barack Obama

Narrated by: Barack Obama

Length: 14 hrs and 4 mins

Publisher's summary

Now available unabridged on audio for the first time

Number one New York Times best seller

One of Essence's 50 Most Impactful Black Books of the Past 50 Years

In this iconic memoir of his early days, Barack Obama “guides us straight to the intersection of the most serious questions of identity, class, and race” (The Washington Post Book World).

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 father - a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man - has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey - first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance.

©2021 Barack Obama (P)2021 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“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 Greg Williams’ Life on the Color Line as a tale of living astride America’s racial categories.” (Scott Turow)

“Provocative.... Persuasively describes the phenomenon of belonging to two different worlds, and thus belonging to neither.” (The New York Times Book Review)

“One of the most powerful books of self-discovery I’ve ever read, all the more so for its illuminating insights into the problems not only of race, class, and color, but of culture and ethnicity. It is also beautifully written, skillfully layered, and paced like a good novel.” (Charlayne Hunter-Gault)