Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.(Review)

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance By Barack Obama. Kodansha Globe (1995), 403 pages, $15.00 hardcover

WHEN I WAS 18, I learned, quite belatedly, that my father's brother had married a black woman. The wedding took place in 1958--the year I was born, the year after my parents married. Instantly I knew that racism had kept me from knowing my uncle (by then dead of a heart attack), my aunt, my cousins. Instantly I knew I would have to find them. But it was one thing to discover that the deepest, most volatile division in the country ran right through my family; actually crossing that divide to claim kinship was, for a long time, too daunting for ...