Wed Aug 4, 2021
The 44th president of the United States Barack Obama, author of the 2020
A Promised Land, entered the world on August 4, 1961, in Hawaii. He first came to national attention in
Dreams from My Father:
A
Story of Race and Inheritance, published in 1995. The author had no record of publication, and the book was unusual in a number of ways.
Dreams from My Father has no index and, beyond the cover, no photos. In the early going, the author is known as Barry and he is the stepson of Lolo Soetoro, the Indonesian foreign student his mother Ann Dunham married in 1965. The author claims he later learned that his real father was Barack H. Obama, a Kenyan foreign student at the University of Hawaii. When Obama left Hawaii to study at Harvard, the story goes, he didn’t take his family with him, but he “bequeathed” his name to the author, and by the end of the book the Kenyan is a nameless “old man.”