At a recent used book sale at the West Windsor Library, I picked up former President Barack Obama’s 1995 memoir which I had, surprisingly, never read. Obama contracted to write the book, after becoming the first African American president of the Harvard Law Journal.  When the book was published he was a little known law professor who was starting his political campaign for the Illinois Senate. The memoir describes how the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for meaning in his life as black American. The book has three parts – his early childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia, his work as a political organizer in Chicago and a trip he took to Kenya to connect for the first time with a wider family on his father’s side to seek out his ancestral roots. The narrative begins with the sudden death of his father, then Obama’s own memories of growing up in Hawaii. As a teenager, he struggled to reconcile his upbringing by a white mother and white grandparents with that of other black teenagers, finding it difficult to come to terms with his identity as a black American. Racism, the resulting lack of self-esteem, the search for identity and the effects of poverty on young people are themes explored throughout the book, as Obama moves between Hawaii, Indonesia, Chicago and Kenya. Obama had a complicated relationship with his father, whom he only met once when he was ten years old.  This is an important on-going theme of the book.  It is only when his sister came to visit him and described the reality of their father’s life in Kenya that many of the images of his father were shattered. Before I started reading the memoir, I worried it would be a one-sided puff piece.  It is not that.  It is a surprisingly candid and oftentimes self-deprecating journey of discovery in which the author fesses up to pot-smoking, moral lapses, crisis of faith and making poor decisions. This is not just a story of the relationship between a father and his son, as the title might suggest. Obama Sr. is featured in the first few chapters in the first part of the book.  His legacy, or more specifically, the version of his father which the future president created from stories and a handful of memories – plays a continual role in his son’s life. There is a strong family aspect, but the focus is more on the extended family, especially maternal grandparents and his dad’s other children. The final section of the book includes an extended passage about the history of the Obama family, as told to the author by his elderly grandmother (and translated by his sister). I found the middle section of this book, focusing on Obama’s work in Chicago, most interesting. At first, he meets with failure. But he perseveres, drawing closer to the community leaders: three black ladies trying to stop black teenagers from joining gangs, and white church leaders who were disillusioned because they have seen no appreciable change. Obama accepts their hospitality and is drawn into their lives. Obama moves from a sense of aimlessness and uncertainty about how to make a difference to a better understanding of the community around him and the ways that an activist can identify and transform the issues that local people really care about. He describes the importance of hope and a belief that change is possible, and the power of small victories. Finally, Obama visits Kenya, the land of his father. He is nervous, describing himself as “an African on his way to a land full of strangers.”   When he arrives, “tired and abandoned”, his suitcase has gone missing, but someone recognizes his name and commiserates on the death of his father. Obama learns that everything in Kenya, including employment, is based on family, tribe, who you know or whether you can pay a large bribe. No one shows any interest in finding his suitcase until he and his sister speak to an uncle who happens to be a good friend of the airport manager. Obama learns that his father never understood the system. He had returned to Kenya expecting to be successful because of his education and personality, but that wasn’t enough. Obama visits the land his great grandfather owned, where his grandmother tells him of a rich oral history going back many generations. He eventually comes to understand the dreams of his father and his grandfather, as well as their failures and disappointments.  There is a strong sense of frustration that he cannot get his own family to see beyond themselves. Throughout the book I saw two Obama traits that were keys to Obama’s uncanny political success – his ability to persevere and triumph no matter what barriers were placed in his path, and his remarkable capacity to instill hope in people that change was possible in spite of overwhelming obstacles they faced. One of the keys to this year’s presidential contest will be whether Kamala Harris will be able to tap into the “audacity of hope” that was crucial to Barack Obama’s electoral success. Irwin Stoolmacher is president of the Stoolmacher Consulting Group, a fundraising and strategic planning firm that works with nonprofit agencies that serve the truly needy among us.