Sarah's Library

22/3 - I'm Australian, I've never spent any extended period of time living in the US, so all of my opinions are those of an outsider looking in. I'm also not much of a political watcher so I don't know all the ins and outs of my own country's political structure, let alone that of America's, so please excuse any mistakes I make or incorrect words I use. I have the political knowledge of the average young teenager.

One of this year's POPSUGAR challenge categories was a political memoir - Barack Obama was the only political figure I could think of who I was interested enough in to have any desire to read a memoir of. I don't like politics and feel like most politicians will say whatever they need to in order to get themselves elected and then feel free to do what they want once they're in, but that's not how I saw Obama. I like Obama, I would have voted for him if I had been given the chance (both times) and now that his time is nearly up I feel sad for him that he was blocked from making so many of the changes that he wanted to make. I felt like he honestly wanted to make his country better for minorities and those who slip through the gaps in the health and education systems and the senate blocked all his attempts simply because he wasn't from the same party as they were, as opposed to them actually thinking that what he was trying to do was a bad idea (put simply, they blocked his proposals out of spite).

Reading this memoir, written 14 years before he was elected president, was very interesting. How and where he grew up, his slightly fractured childhood and his 'relationship' with his father, mostly through other family members after his father's death. In the chapters set during his time in Kenya there were a lot of family members and I kept getting their exact relationship to Obama confused, my reading of this would have benefitted from a list of family members and how they were related to Obama at the back/beginning of the book.

If this book was re-re-released with a third introduction from soon-to-be former President Obama I would be happy to read it again (it was re-released in 2004 after he was elected to the senate with a new introduction and that's the edition I read) as I wonder how the events of his life since he wrote the book would differ from 20 years ago. I would definitely consider reading his second book if I came across it at the library.

POPSUGAR 2016 Reading Challenge: A Political Memoir