“Dreams from My Father,” one of two autobiographies penned by Barack Obama (so far), has been hailed as “No. 5” on the best 100 nonfiction books in the history of time in a list slowly trickling forth from The Guardian.
List-maker Robert McCrum claims to be seeking “the classic titles that form the core of Anglo-American literary culture: the 100 key texts that have had a decisive influence on the shaping of the Anglo-American imagination.”
The list of the 100 best-ever nonfiction books follows on the heels of a list of 100 best novels from the famous left-wing newspaper out of London. To appear on either list, the book’s author must have written it in English. Also, the lists are limited to one book per author (so Obama’s “The Audacity of Hope” is out).
McCrum glorifies “Dreams from My Father,” published in 1995, as “a shaft of clarity and brilliance in the prevailing murk” — at least compared to typical fare by politicians.
Obama “executed an affecting personal memoir with grace and style, narrating an enthralling story with honesty, elegance and wit, as well as an instinctive gift for storytelling,” McCrum gushes.
“From his opening line, ‘A few months after my twenty-first birthday, a stranger called to give me the news …,’ it was clear that ‘Dreams from My Father’ was something special,” McCrum, a famed literary editor — and writer of no particular merit — acclaims wildly. He does not explain what makes this dark-and-rainy-night-style opening line special.
“As the son of a black African father from Kenya, and a white American mother from Wichita, Kansas, the young Obama had to make a crucial psychological odyssey, fraught with many conflicting emotions,” McCrum explains. “At first, he traces the movement of his mother’s family from Kansas to Hawaii, and thence to Indonesia. One of the many distinctive qualities to the book is Obama’s natural and fearless way with dialogue. He animates countless scenes between his young self, his mother and his grandparents with scraps of well-remembered, or possibly well-imagined, conversation that give the narrative a delightful informality.”
“As ‘a boy’s search for his father’ there is inevitably less of a focus on Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham,” McCrum also observes. “Her absence is perhaps the most telling feature of Obama’s recollections, raising many questions about his relationship to the American component of his identity equation.”
McCrum also notes that Obama describes himself as a “tragic mulatto.”
The Guardian’s ongoing list of the best 100 nonfiction books is not arranged in the traditional format of best to next-best, etc. Instead, it is chronological — apparently by release date. (RELATED: COMEDY GOLD: The Guardian Achieves Platonically Perfect Obituary For Obscure Leftist)
“This time … we are going backwards, moving from the present day to the distant past, from classics in the making to outright masterpieces,” The Guardian explains.
Other titles on the list thus far include “No Logo” by Naomi Klein and Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking.”
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