 WE NEED A LIBRARY COLLECTION!
Dear Mr. President:
As a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (Honduras, 1975-1977), I request your help to create a new Special Collection at the Library of Congress, the Peace Corps Experience Collection. This would include published memoirs, letters, essays, novels, short stories and poetry inspired by service. By creating such a repository, the Library of Congress would become a historical guardian for the Peace Corps' collective memory and promote understanding (the Peace Corps' third goal).
Currently, there is no such treasure. The Kennedy Library only accepts original material. Tragically, even the Peace Corps Resource Library in Washington D.C. does not keep published work written by its own volunteers, the salt of the earth. As the fiftieth anniversary of the Peace Corps' inception approaches, let us correct this.
As you know, hundreds of thousands of Americans have heard the call and hundreds have returned to fulfill that pledge to share their experience through literature. Since commercial publishers have historically shown little interest in Peace Corps Volunteer's literature, ninety percent of these books are self-published. The Library of Congress currently will not accept any book unless at least 500 copies were printed. In today's Print-On-Demand publishing world, this excludes almost all Peace Corps' books.
Popular government sponsored programs are rare. During the first half of the twentieth century only the W.P.A. and the C.C.C. caught America's imagination. During the second half of the twentieth century, only N.A.S.A. and the Peace Corps have been equally popular. Yet, like the W.P.A. and the C.C.C., first-hand experience books about the Peace Corps are hard to find and our collective memory fades.
The Library of Congress has a great set of special collections, several of which include twentieth century work. There is even a collection of "Amateur Publications" by early twentieth century journalists! The addition Peace Corps literature will serve our nation well at no cost to the tax payer. The books will be donated. Web sites related to the Peace Corps are numerous.
Most wise leaders are remembered for supporting the arts and learning. This is an opportunity for President Obama. The fiftieth anniversary is the perfect time to announce the creation of a Peace Corps Experience Collection within the Library of Congress. Thanking you in advance for your kind consideration,
Gift for my mother
My mother really enjoyed reading this book. She was born in the South during the depression. President Obama is her hero. It was a treat to read about his life.
 Honesty of a Politician
This is on the whole a very interesting book. When it was first published it was not such a big seller as it is now, as clearly people are now really curious about the background of the first black president of the USA.
In many ways President Obama's background is very appropriate to the head if the USA, which has often been called the melting-pot, into which all different cultures and nationalities come together; the result is the unique American. Perhaps more than any of the ordinary American's the President's background is very varied, both culturally and geographically. This must make it possible for him to relate to the ne3eds, the desires and aspirations of all Americans.
This is a good read because you get the feeling that he is being very honest about his life, his earlier work whereby he began to formulate his idea of change and political philosophy he adopted.
There is some imbalance in the book. There is very little about Michelle; but this may be deliberate. There is perhaphs too much detail about his relatives in Kenya. After sometime the reader gets lost in all the different names and connections. It was obviously important to the President, but perhaps a little boring for the reader.
I wanted to know a lot more about the development of his thoughts on race. When he took his white friends to a party, and politely they left early- what did he make of that? In many ways we can see he is telling us what he is thinking and experiencing, but I think we would have liked a little more about the conclusions he reached about race.
The book helps us to reflect upon and understand how the world is changing.
SHOCKED
All the while I was reading this, I was thinking, "This man is our President?" Needless to say, I wouldn't even bat an eye if President Obama decided to step down from his elected position and become a writer. He's phenomenal. Do not read this book to gain an insight on our President, or simply because's it Barack Obama. Read it because it's a great book. However, as I have said before in previous reviews, skim through the book a bit before deciding to buy, because not everyone's literary tastes are the same.
Why Obama Leads the Way He Does
I bought my copy of Dreams from My Father in late July 2008, a few short months before the svelte campaign of Barack Obama came to a triumphant end mere miles from my apartment in Lakeview, on Chicago's North Side. Swept up in the euphoria of not just his historic run, but the entire 2008 Presidential campaign, I wasn't able to find time to down Mr. Obama's 1995 memoir.
Instead, I read his book more than a year into our country's first African-American President, after historic (for better or worse) health care reform, squabbles over Wall Street, and true concerns about our nation's place in the world. It is extremely difficult, regardless of your political disposition, to discern how Mr. Obama has changed our country and its image, both of itself and in the rest of the world.
I don't pretend to know how our current leader has changed the world. But I can say with some confidence that reading this book, written before Mr. Obama joined the public circus that is American politics, allows a reader an unfiltered view of the formative years of an important American. Learning about Mr. Obama's internal struggles to find his place in American society, his ambivalent feelings towards "whiteness," and his personal frailties, I have a much better appreciation for the way he runs our country.
Dreams suggests a man better equipped, from multiple perspectives, to lead a diverse and changing country like ours, than anyone. Mr. Obama's time running around Indonesia as a young child, learning what it means to be a man from men not his father, gave him a view into what it means to work hard for one's spoils, even if those spoils are minimal. His school days in Hawaii, his growing self-realization and growing anger towards racism he sees even in the melting pot of Hawaii, didn't prepare him for what he would soon witness in Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago. (Maybe I'm biased--I myself have lived in these three cities Obama called home.)
We see Mr. Obama's wild side at Occidental in Los Angeles; he convinces us that he puts that part of his life behind him and gets serious in New York. His time in Chicago prepares him for a lifetime of activism, organization, and overcoming tough odds. Most moving of all is Mr. Obama's journey to Kenya, the land of his ancestors, the place in which much of his family remain. It's clear that returning to the land of his distant father is an emotionally wrenching experience for a man most view as beyond emotion, instead calm and calculated. At "home," he finds a family thrilled to see him. He finds a family both united and torn apart by the legacy of a brilliant but selfish and self-righteous father.
It is rare that we get such a frank and intimate view into the formative stages of such a public figure's life. We are lucky that Obama's rise to the editor of the Harvard Law Review piqued someone's interest in the life of this unique and articulate American. I now know well just why Mr. Obama makes his decisions so carefully. His life is one of nuance, of complication, of ambiguity, of shades of gray.
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