Taking with interest the performance of all the presidents of the United States since Franklin D. Roosevelt, and having concluded that the character who filled that position with the greatest dignity and highest aspirations was Barack Obama, his book was sought to shed light on how he had been such an exemplary character. molded. The book is very well written and tells an absorbing story of interest, but in terms of understanding the author’s personal development it leaves some questions unanswered. Perhaps more significant progress was made after the book was written.

Barack Obama recounts how he was born in Hawaii to a white mother and a black father who was a student from Kenya. His father left after two years and Barack was raised by his mother and second husband in Indonesia, and by his mother and parents in Hawaii. His father came on a month-long visit when Barack was ten years old and this was the only contact he could remember. However, being only half black and raised by his white family, Barack noticed the color of his skin and wrote: “… my color had always been a sufficient criterion to be a member of the community, enough cross to bear” . After working with poor black communities in Chicago, he set out to explore his father’s roots in Africa.

Children of mixed parents can vary widely in skin color, from almost as black as black to almost as white as white. Barack Obama seems to have considered himself at the darkest end of the spectrum. For example, he recounts how he was mistaken for a deceased half-brother, David, who was a Kenyan thoroughbred. Another half brother, Mark, who was born in Kenya to a white mother, Ruth, is described as “a black man of my height and complexion.” As his appearance was by no means unusual, Barack was easily accepted into his extended family in Kenya.

His half brother, Mark, is said to have been moved by Beethoven’s symphonies and Shakespeare’s sonnets and preferred the United States to Kenya. One suspects that Barack shares these feelings, but does not say so. However, in the preface to the 2004 reprint of his book, Barack Obama mentions that his mother passed away shortly after the original publication. He poignantly writes that ‘I think sometimes, if I had known that she would not survive her illness, I could have written a different book, less a meditation on the absent father, more a celebration of the one constant in my life. ‘It is perhaps with this additional insight that we can begin to see how the most admired American president of the modern era came to harmonize and personify the best characteristics of two continents and two cultures.