Review of President Obama's Book - 'Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance' by Laurel Davila

On this Father's Day, we wish our community a happy time of celebration with family and friends. Today, I took some time to read President Barack Obama's book about his father.

His book describes the complexities of the mix of culture and ethnicity, not only in America, but seemingly in the world itself. A man who had a father, yet did not know him that well. A man who had a culture, yet had trouble reconciling his experience in it. He describes his life, and loss, with a frankness that makes you at once cry ... and yet wonder at the same time how we could be so lucky to have him as our President.

President Obama: "We hold these truths to be self-evident." "In those words, I hear the spirit of Douglass and Delany, as well as Jefferson and Lincoln; the struggles of Martin and Malcolm and unheralded marchers to bring these words to life. I hear the voices of Japanese families interned behind barbed wire; young Russian Jews cutting patterns in Lower East Side sweatshops; dust-bowl farmers loading up their trucks with the remains of shattered lives. I hear the voices of the people in Altgeld Gardens, and the voices of those who stand outside this country's borders, the weary, hungry bands crossing the Rio Grande. I hear all of these voices clamoring for recognition, all of them asking the very same questions that have come to shape my life, the same questions that I sometimes, late at night, find myself asking the Old Man. What is our community, and how might that community be reconciled with our freedom?" - Page 437, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama

http://www.amazon.com/Dreams-My-Father-Story-Inheritance/dp/1400082773

https://www.facebook.com/ProgressiveDemocratsMovingForwardNotBack