THE SETTING OF A BOOK

The time and place where a book is set have such an instrumental effect on the book. The setting of a book that is inclusive of time and place often switches to the reader to move from one perspective view of the book to another. A book whose setting seems to be adamantly stagnant seems to is boring and lacks an attraction that could attract a reader, Therefore switching the time of place of a book makes a reader more interested in the book thereby reading the book to the end. Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance is an example of a book where the author shifts his story of life with place and time, making the reader gain more interests in the book.

The general feeling of Obama’s book is one that creates sympathy. In the book, Obama focuses on is life as a young African-American in an American community where the largest group is that of whites. Obama is not however just settled with living in a white community without understanding how he got there and he, therefore, goes through such a hard time while trying to understand his decent. For instance, in the book Obama explains that the only he understands is that his father was killed in a car accident. It is a sympathetic tone since one sympathizes with him wondering whether he would really understand and learn about his origin.

Two most outstanding characters in the book are Obama and his father. Obama is a learned man at this time who has a political career and which could be said to be well-paying. On the other hand, his father was an unstable immigrant who had moved to the United States in need of education. The two characters both display a yearning for prosperity but Obama prospers while his father does not and he purportedly dies horribly. Their physical input towards prosperity however matches.

In the book, Obama is in many instances in conflict with himself. As the narrator in the story, he explains how much he is sorry for having not understood his native decent as an African because he was so much interested in gaining an education and a good career. However, while he still thinks that he was wrong, another pull that tells him that the education and establishment of a career were necessary as they gave him the ability to learn about his African decent better because he was in a better position.

Obama’s story is a self-reflective book that is written in the first person. He is in the core of the story and the book itself is an explanation of his desire to learn his origin and how the same origin would motivate him and shape his future. By writing the book in the first person, the author who is a renowned public figure made the readers more interested in not only reading the book but also gaining an understanding of the book. I am personally attracted by the way that Obama explains the way he traces his origin and a socio-cultural view that everyone deserves to learn their origin and the culture of where they rise from crowns my thinking. One of the phrases that I learned from the book is, “My identity might begin with the fact of my race, but it didn’t, couldn’t end there. At least that’s what I would choose to believe.” The phrase attracts me because it teaches me the value of believing in self against all the odds to become the best. 

ReferencesObama, Barack. Dreams from my father: A story of race and inheritance. Canongate Books, 2007.