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Barack Obama in Dreams from My Father presents a memoir of his early life, his struggle for identity and his academic path. It also includes his early days in Chicago as a community organizer. Generally, what the public knows about Barack Obama comes from his own accounts.

Despite his meteoric rise, Barack Obama is not well known on a national scale beyond his own writings in Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope. Those who have read these accounts usually form very favorable opinions of Barack Obama as he guides us on a path of his early life endeavors.

Dreams from My Father offers a narrative that is compelling and well accepted by the public. It was written in 1995, but it leaves out some pertinent details regarding Obama's childhood days in Hawaii and his days of community organizing in Illinois.

Obama was born in Hawaii to Kenyan Barack Hussein Obama Sr. and Kansan Stanley Ann Dunham in 1961. Barack senior left the family to pursue his education at Harvard when Obama was two years old, and Barry, as Obama was known in childhood, only saw him one time after that. Stanley Ann married Lolo Soetoro a few years later and the family moved to Indonesia.

Obama's mother initially supported the acculturation of young Barry in Indonesia, but she changed her mind believing that Barry would have a better chance to succeed in the U.S. At that point, she ordered an American English correspondence course and put young Barry on a rigid schedule tutoring him at 4 AM in the morning, five days a week.

When Obama was sent to live with his grandparents in Hawaii, his grandfather became friends with someone Obama refers to as "Frank." Frank became a mentor to Barry and advised him to get and education but never turn his back on his black community. Frank, later identified as Frank Marshall Davis, previously lived in Chicago and was a poet, journalist and activist.

Davis was married to a socialite and his children were also half black and half white. That might have been the appeal to Obama's grandfather, Stanley Dunham to foster the relationship. How much influence Frank Davis had on Obama is not known, but Davis' ties to the CPUSA are not revealed in Dreams and not written about in MSM.

Once on the mainland, Obama attended Occidental College on the west coast and after a year transferred to Columbia University. There, he hung out with anti-establishment students and graduated in due course. After four years in New York, he moved to Chicago.

His days as a Chicago organizer sent him to a far south Chicago community. According to the community organizer handbook, Obama's job was to go into the community and stir up dissension in order to move the community to action based on Saul Alinsky organizing tactics. After three years, Obama left for Harvard to pursue a law degree.

His memoirs cover the period of early childhood up until the time he entered Harvard. It's an interesting read and very well written, but it omits details that are pertinent to his political infancy and growth in Illinois politics.

Today, Obama is the Democratic nominee for POTUS. Whether he wins or not, he has earned his place in history books along with Hillary Clinton.

Learn more about this author, Mona Gallagher.
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