Barack Obama's reflective 1995 memoir shows how he thinks his way through a challenge

[babylonsister]

http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/nj_20080823_6752.php

A Window On The Potential Essayist In Chief
Barack Obama's reflective 1995 memoir shows how he thinks his way through a challenge.

by Will Englund

Saturday, Aug. 23, 2008


Barack Obama is one of those people who think by writing--or, to put it another way, who write to think. His 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father, is proof of that. He acknowledges from the start that the book he ended up writing is nothing at all like the one he sat down to produce. It was going to be an essay on race, and instead it ended up an account of his attempts to find his bearings in a country that thinks in terms of black and white, and to understand the legacy of his African father.

Obama caught the crest of the wave of the modern memoir; it's a literary weaving of the "remembered self," as Thomas Larson, who has written extensively about the craft of memoir, puts it, and of the "remembering self." The reader follows Obama through an investigation that's in both past and present tenses.

He comes across as someone who throughout his youth weighs various possible identities--the son of an African, the kid who's been living abroad in Indonesia, the preppy Ivy Leaguer, the grandson of hardworking and complicated Kansans, the black nationalist, the earnest liberal--and considers the arguments in favor of each. He reflects and drills down. He lets doubt lead to insight, as Larson says, and he shows that he can live with indecision.

And yet there's no lack of control. "He's a very conscious guy," says Darryl Pinckney, a poet and writer in residence at Skidmore College, where he teaches a course on black autobiography as American history. "He's not improvising himself from moment to moment. He writes from self-knowledge. There's nothing inadvertent."

snip//

Obama brings a different and sharper perspective to American politics. But there's more to it than that. "You do not know where you're going with a memoir," Larson says. "We're getting in a dinghy and going out to sea." It takes a certain amount of intellectual courage to do that--or at least audacity. "And imagine," says Larson, "what he's going to write, whether he wins or loses, after all this."

[auburngrad82]

1. I'm reading it now.

Very interesting story and well written. I also like the honesty as far as drug use, etc. If you put it all out there early on the other side can't accuse you of hiding it.

Obama's honesty is what I like best about him. It's refreshing to have a politician who's not hiding a bunch of crap.

[babylonsister]

2. OK, this is good. nt