100 best nonfiction books: No 5 - Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama (1995)

This remarkably frank junior senator memory after Illinois revealed not only a literary talent, but a force that would change the face of American politics forever • What to do list? Give us your opinion here.

prior to the 2008 presidential elections in the United States, the main season roller coaster expected, Hillary Clinton, to play a leading role, and possibly win ,, period was commissioned by the Observer review campaign biographies of democratic principle and Republican contenders, from a list of candidates that covered the full range of improbability of John McCain and Mitt Romney, John Kerry, John Edwards and Joe Biden. Terrible as these politicians seemed to be in the election campaign, his complete works made a catalog even more worthwhile. All books reviewed were found to be good ghost pointers, or "As account". Every last one of them was a farrago of wonkishness, insincerity, and the cliché, controversial half-truths and pieces of old campaign speeches, mash-up press releases and policy statements, reheated for popular consumption in some of the most boring imaginable American prose. Was it possible that none of the candidates had not even read these books, let alone writing them?

There was, however, an exception, a ray of clarity and brightness in the prevailing darkness. One of the strange Democrats, Senator for the state of Illinois, a certain Barack Obama, had not only written his own book some years before, had also executed a personal memory that affects with grace and style, which tells a gripping story with honesty , elegance and wit, and an instinctive gift for storytelling.

From its opening line, "A few months after my twenty-first birthday, a stranger called to give me the news ..." it was clear that my father's dreams was something special. He had a voice, and an unmistakable authority. Indeed, at the point where I picked it up, memories of Obama had been published for about 12 years and was belatedly becoming a bestseller in the United States about the growing wave of support for the winning candidate and optimistic " Yes we can "campaign.

Already in 2007, many millions, had never heard of Barack Obama, I was vaguely aware that he had made an electrifying speech at the Democratic convention of 2004. Now, not only I start to follow his campaign, I have suggested in the Observer that a presidential candidate with such literary and rhetorical gifts deserved to be in the White House, and predicted that, against all odds, could prevail. Anyway, a year later, everything had come to pass. Hillary Clinton (shades of 2016) had been overlooked by voters. "Yes We Can" had become "Yes we did".

The story told in a dream of my father is as remarkable as Obama's rise to power, and shows an acute sensitivity to the lingering trauma of the US political solution: the race. This is the problem that had troubled Thomas Jefferson, as he once said, "like a fire bell in the night", and becomes the starting point for Obama. As an African American, Obama declared ambition to "speak in some way to the fissures of the race that characterized the American experience". Race, for many, remains one of the most controversial issues in contemporary America. Obama's presidency has been dogged by race relations. His own occasional uncertain response shows how difficult it remains a subject.

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