NY Times Book review of "Dreams from my Father" by Obama

Obama’s Foursquare Politics, With a Dab of Dijon

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: October 17, 2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/17/books/17kaku.html

His 1995 memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” written before Mr. Obama entered politics, provided a revealing, introspective account of his efforts to trace his family’s tangled roots and his attempts to come to terms with his absent father, who left home when he was still a toddler. That book did an evocative job of conjuring the author’s multicultural childhood: his father was from Kenya, his mother was from Kansas, and the young Mr. Obama grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia.

And it was equally candid about his youthful struggles: pot, booze and “maybe a little blow,” he wrote, could “push questions of who I was out of my mind,” flatten “out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory.”