by Orrin Konheim

Created on: December 23, 2008

To say that Barack Obama represents the great diversity of the American people is an understatent. Barack Obama's family background is probably more diverse than all but a handful of Americans. An examination of Barack Obama's background is filled with ironies, unanswered question and a renewed appreciation for the definition of family and that's what makes his book so compelling,

Barack Obama has been grouped as African-American and is thought of as our nation's first African-American president, but in actuality, Obama's upbringing has very little in common with the African-American experience. While he was aware of his racial identity through his dark skin and got treated by his peers and teachers at school accordingly, Obama was actually raised by his caucasian mother Stanley Ann Dunham and her parents and coming from Hawaii via Kansas, they had very little to do with the African-American experience. The book takes on the theme of self-discovery and in Obama's prose, he has a great self-awareness and an ability to analyze just how and why he is different from his peers.

The book is divided into three parts and starts out with Obama taking us through his schooldays growing up in Hawaii as one of the only black people in his prestigious prep school before eventually taking us to his college days in Los Angeles and New York.

The second part, somewhat uninteresting by comparison, discusses his days as a community organizer in Chicago and th beginning of his career. It was in Chicago that Barack met his half-sister Auma who started to answer questions about what his family and father was like.

In the cathartic third act, Barack finally goes to Kenya to reunite with his family and meets his brothers, sisters, aunts. uncles, his step-mom and his grandmother where he finally learns to feel at home. For someone who is now president, it is not only immensely interesting to see where Barack Obama came from, but it is even more interesting to see the experience through Barack's eyes.

Through anecdotes from relatives and the story of Barack's own family (particularly, the difference between his grandfather and the other villagers in terms of their reactions to European contact), the book also serves as an immensely informative text on what exactly Kenya is like and what its people have gone through over the last two generations when they went from having no contact with Western civilization to in a short span of time being colonized by it, freed from it, and being forced to deal with the ravages of modernity.

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