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To: TenthAmendmentChampion
Has anyone here actually read this book?

I have.

Jack Cashill seems to admire the skill in the language of DOMF, aside from the authorship issue.

He qualified that, I believe. He admires the quality of some of the language employed in "Dreams from My Father," but finds much of it confusing -- and probably purposely so -- as well as boring in needless details and endless conversations. It's the kind of book in which you'll be hard-pressed to go back and find some reference or passage once you've read it, because there's not much logical order to it. A pad of annotated post-it notes is essential if you plan on finding any passages quickly.

It sounded like one big long leftist rant about how terrible American society is, which seems very boring.

Make that repeated soliloquies on the problem of race, racists and inequities caused by race -- launched on the flimsiest of excuses. For example, he writes of his parents' marriage and his birth in Hawaii, then launches into a history of miscegenation (interacial marriage) and racial discrimination against blacks -- but there were never any laws against miscegenation in Hawaii, and even his mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, wrote extensively about how Hawaii was relatively free of discrimination against blacks; in fact, to Davis' delight, whites (haoles) were more likely to encounter discrimination there during the era Obama was born and grew up.

In general, the book raises more questions than it answers, and I doubt that many people, including the media,  have slogged through the entire thing, page by page, until the merciful end.

48 posted on 10/22/2008 11:32:12 AM PDT by browardchad
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To: browardchad

One thing many people don’t point out (with regard to the soliloquies on race, etc.) is how obviously influenced the book is by things that would not have influenced Obama, but would have been very significant to Ayers, who is about 15 years older, in other words, a different generation. The rants in Dreams seem to be very much influenced by Frantz Fanon, and even by Jean Genet and other French writers, who had built a cult of the heroic alienated criminal black male, sometimes a political terrorist, and sometimes not officially so. But it counted anyway, because the personal was the political, and therefore people like Eldridge Cleaver could claim that raping white women was a political act because it was meant to punish white men, who were, of course, the oppressors.

Be that as it may, by the time Obama decided that he had found a hook by identifying himself as black, those writers had passed their glory days. But not for whoever wrote Obama’s book.


53 posted on 10/22/2008 11:49:54 AM PDT by livius
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