Dreams from My Father

In this memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins when Barack Obama learns his father—a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man—has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey to search for his father's origins—first in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother's family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father's life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance.