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'dreams From My Father' Reveals More About Obama Than Is Usually Known About Political Leaders Until After They're Dead. Perhaps More Than It Intends, It Shows His Mind Working, In Real Time, Sentence By Sentence, In What Feels Like A Private Audience With The Reader.

-Jonathan Raban

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'dreams From My Father'

Jonathan Raban

...

'dreams From My Father' Reveals More About Obama Than Is Usually Known About Political Leaders Until After They're Dead. Perhaps More Than It Intends, It Shows His Mind Working, In Real Time, Sentence By Sentence, In What Feels Like A Private Audience With The Reader.

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The Falklands Held A Mirror Up To Our Own Islands, And It Reflected, In Brilliantly Sharp Focus, All Our Injured Belittlement, Our Sense Of Being Beleaguered, Neglected And Misunderstood.

The Only Book By A Modern President That Bears Serious Comparison With Obama's 'dreams From My Father' Is Jimmy Carter's Short Campaign Autobiography, 'why Not The Best?,' Published In 1975.

Living In Cities Is An Art, And We Need The Vocabulary Of Art, Of Style, To Describe The Peculiar Relationship Between Man And Material That Exists In The Continual Creative Play Of Urban Living. The City As We Imagine It, Then, Soft City Of Illusion, Myth, Aspiration, And Nightmare, Is As Real, Maybe More Real, Than The Hard City One Can Locate On Maps In Statistics, In Monographs On Urban Sociology And Demography And Architecture.

Simply As A Writer Of Books I'm Thrilled And Proud That Seattle Should Have Raised, On A Public Vote, Sufficient Money To Build A Central Library, And Moreover To Rebuild Every Other Library In The City: 28 Of Them.

It Always Seems To Me Odd To Call A Place A Wilderness When Every Wilderness Area In The Us Bristles With Rules And Regulations As To How You Can Behave, What You're Allowed To Do, And Is Patrolled By Armed Rangers Enforcing The Small Print. They're Parks, Of Course, Not Wildernesses At All.

Rules And Regulations

One Of The Oddest Features Of Western Christianized Culture Is Its Ready Acceptance Of The Myth Of The Stable Family And The Happy Marriage. We Have Been Taught To Accept The Myth Not As An Heroic Ideal, Something Good, Brave, And Nearly Impossible To Fulfil, But As The Very Fiber Of Normal Life. Given Most Families And Most Marriages, The Belief Seems Admirable But Foolhardily.

Good Travel Books Are Novels At Heart.

It's Been So Long Since A Talented Writer Last Occupied The White House; No Wonder, Then, That American Writers Have Been Among The Most Prominent Of All The Demographic Groups Claiming A Piece Of Barack Obama For Themselves.

Books Admitted Me To Their World Open-handedly, As People For Their Most Part, Did Not. The Life I Lived In Books Was One Of Ease And Freedom, Worldly Wisdom, Glitter, Dash And Style.

One Classic American Landscape Haunts All Of American Literature. It Is A Picture Of Eden, Perceived At The Instant Of History When Corruption Has Just Begun To Set It. The Serpent Has Shown His Scaly Head In The Undergrowth. The Apple Gleams On The Tree. The Old Drama Of The Fall Is Ready To Start All Over Again.

I've Taught The Better Class Of Tourist Both To See And Not To See; To Lift Their Eyes Above And Beyond The Inessentials, And Thrill To Our Western Nature In Her Majesty.

The Only Real River I Knew Was Hardly More Than A Brook. It Spilled Through A Tumbledown Mill At The Bottom Of Our Road, Opened Into A Little Trouty Pool, Then Ran On Through Water Meadows Over Graveled Shallows Into Fakenham [england], Where It Slowed And Deepened, Gathering Strength For The Long Drifts Across Muddy Flatlands To Norwich And The North Sea.

Democrats Inhabit The Low Shores Of Puget Sound, Mostly On Its Eastern Side, In A Ragged Trail Of Port-cities That Stretches From Bellingham, Close To The Canadian Border, Through Everett, Seattle, And Tacoma, To Olympia, The State Capital, At The Southern End Of The Sound.

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The North-south Line Of 'the Mountains,' Meaning The Cascade Range, Forty Miles East Of Seattle, Is A Rigid Political Frontier.

In Novels And Autobiographies, The First Positive Move That The Immigrant Makes Towards Assimilation Is To Buy Himself A Suit Of City Clothes.

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By The End Of The 1980s, Seattle Had Taken On The Dangerous Lustre Of A Promised City. The Rumour Had Gone Out That If You Had Failed In Detroit You Might Yet Succeed In Seattle - And That If You'd Succeeded In Seoul, You Could Succeed Even Better In Seattle... Seattle Was The Coming Place. So I Joined The Line Of Hopefuls.

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'dreams From My Father' Reveals More About Obama Than Is Usually Known About Political Leaders Until After They're Dead. Perhaps More Than It Intends, It Shows His Mind Working, In Real Time, Sentence By Sentence, In What Feels Like A Private Audience With The Reader.

At Night, What You See Is A City, Because All You See Is Lights. By Day, It Doesn't Look Like A City At All. The Trees Out-number The Houses. And That's Completely Typical Of Seattle. You Can't Quite Tell: Is It A City, Is It A Suburb, Is The Forest Growing Back?

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