Abandoned by Booklikes

So I always feel a little bit weird rating memoirs. I don't ever want someone to take a look at one of my reviews and think that equals me hating their life, but in some cases not all memoirs are the same. Luckily, for the most part I really liked this one.

Prior to becoming President of the United States, Barack Obama wrote the first of his memoirs. At the time he was preparing to launch his campaign to run for the Senate in Illinois.

We have President Obama providing details on his parents courtship (Barack Obama, Sr. of Kenya, and Ann Dunham of Wichita, Kansas) after they meet at the University of Hawaii. For a time the couple was happy, but eventually his father left and eventually divorced his mother when President Obama was two years old.

I have to say that reading about President Obama's upbringing by his grandparents and mother in Hawaii was fascinating. You can read his push/pull to figure out where he belonged, what did it mean to be half-white and half black in Hawaii.

He had several internal discussions with himself on what to do with his half-Kenyan side since that part of his father's family was separate from him for the most part. When President Obama's father eventually comes to stay with them again for a month when he was a child, I could feel the tension that he felt, and the sadness that his mother felt as well for not being able to work things out with this man that definitely seemed so big. When we get past his recollections of college and working I was happy to read more about his family that lives in Kenya.

I thought the writing was very good, but will say that the flow was hit or miss at times. I think that anytime President Obama strayed away from his family I found myself losing interest. Reading about his struggles in high school, college, and eventually when he is living and working in New York and Chicago did not come as a surprise to me. I think that any black woman or man that is one of the first people in their family to graduate college/grad school or obtains a high paying job deals with "black guilt". You feel guilty for making something of yourself and you feel guilty for not feeling tied to people that you used to know or even your own family. It is definitely a double edged sword.

The settings of Hawaii and Indonesia came very much alive when President Obama was reliving his childhood in both places. He has a very deft way of describing people and places that worked for this memoir. The parts of the book that dealt with his Kenyan family were sad in a lot of places. You get to read more about his father and ultimately the strained relationships among some of the relatives and you get more understanding about Kenya and how marriages worked in that country during that time. I say during that time but for all I know that is still the way that marriages work now.

The ending though I felt was a little abrupt. I am very glad that I read this book and would recommend to anyone wanting to know more about President Obama.