Barack Hussein Obama: a Book Review

Bruce Bawer writes in Pajamas Media "Why I Haven't Caught Obama Fever." Bawer recently read Obama's memoirDreams From My Father, and found much of it very disturbing. Obama was raised mostly on the beaches of Hawaii by an "unfailingly selfless and loving mother" and devoted grandparents, all of whom happen to be white. Yet, he mostly ignores them and spends all of the book praising his black father, who abandoned him when Obama was two!

His father, Dr. Obama, went back to Africa, where he was a high ranking official in the Kenyan government. He was a polygamist, and "lousy husband to all his wives." However, to Barack, he was a heroic, near mythic figure. Bawer writes,

One can, of course, well understand why a small boy – or even a young man – might idealize out of all proportion the father he never met. But Obama shows few signs in this book of recognizing that he’s doing this. Meanwhile, perversely, he treats his mother and grandparents, who by his own account raised him with extraordinary devotion, all but dismissively.

Perhaps most discouraging is that Obama reveals himself to be "unbearably self-absorbed – yet, at the same time, astonishingly short on self-knowledge." He seems to feel owed something by the world, and is obsessed with racial injustice of whites against blacks.