All-TIME 100 Nonfiction Books

Dreams from My Father

Much like its author, Barack Obama’s first memoir defies easy categorization. In some stores, it’s shelved with autobiographies, while others place it in African-American history. Of course, now it’s simply American history. First published in 1995, it is one of the few presidential memoirs written before the subject was burdened with the self-consciousness of a man aiming for the nation’s highest office, or the completion of a presidency, when every word is subject to the tint of political hindsight.

But even if Obama hadn’t ended up in the White House, Dreams from My Father would still be a compelling and beautifully written American story about the son of a black man and a white woman, his search for his African father and how he found a “workable meaning for his life as a black American.” It’s a portrait of a man who breaks the mold yet reveres the rules. We see the boldness of someone who could walk away from a career as a well-paid financial analyst in New York City for a low-paid and often frustrating community-organizer job in Chicago. But we also get a sense of Obama’s other, more passive side, the guy who got a contract to write a book about race while still at Harvard Law School and who then chose to become an academic rather than an activist — a professor of constitutional law, rather than, say, a civil rights lawyer. In the end, whether you read this book through the prism of politics or as a coming-of-age tale, it’s important and illuminating.

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