Dreams From My Father; The Audacity of Hope: A Story of Race and Inheritance; Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream

This account traces the early years of Barack Obama, who later became the 44th president, from his childhood in Hawaii through his unsettled teenage years and his time at university in New York. Born to a white American mother and a Kenyan father he barely knew, he spent part of his boyhood in Indonesia before his grandparents raised him in Honolulu. As he moves into adulthood, he works with neighborhood groups in Chicago and eventually travels to Kenya, where he meets relatives he has never known. Along the way he wrestles with questions of race, belonging and what it means to carry two inheritances at once. The result is a reflective look at a young man searching for his place in the world, shaped by the family around him and by the father who remained largely a figure of rumor.