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即将卸任的美国总统奥巴马曾经想要成为一名作家。他在1995年出版了一本自传 Dreams From My Father（台译《以父之名》）。 
这本书出版后，反响不差，但是销量却不好。直到2004年奥巴马在参选参议员时，本书再版，才引起读者重视。
父亲对奥巴马来说是一个复杂的形象。
Barack Obama Sr.
奥巴马的父亲来自肯尼亚，是一名经济学家。在到夏威夷求学之前，老奥巴马曾经娶过一个妻子还有两房妾室。在夏威夷，老奥巴马遇到了奥巴马总统的母亲， Stanley Ann Dunham，并与之相爱结婚。奥巴马两岁时，他的父母分居并离婚。
自父母离婚之后，奥巴马只在11岁的时候见过父亲一次。奥巴马在母亲和外婆身边长大，有一半非洲血统的他成了家族中唯一一个黑人。
奥巴马的母亲17岁时在夏威夷遇见了前来求学父亲
二十岁时，奥巴马接到一个电话，说父亲在肯尼亚遭受车祸去世了。虽然奥巴马和父亲之间很难说有什么深厚的感情，但是父亲给自己印上的非洲印记却无论如何也无法抹去。
父亲的去世给奥巴马带来了巨大打击。奥巴马更曾经因为身世纠葛迷途放荡。
在1988年进入哈佛法学院就读之前，奥巴马曾经见过自己同父异母的姐姐一面。奥巴马萌生了去肯尼亚寻根的念头。对于父亲破碎的记忆，在亲人的情感交流中逐渐完整。
奥巴马和外公外婆在纽约中央公园。他是家族中唯一一个黑人
对于黑人身份的认同使他逐渐产生了政治抱负。最终，他在年仅46岁的时候当选了美国历史上第一位黑人总统。
治国上的功过是非自有后人评说，但是在一个种族关系极为复杂的国度成为第一个黑人总统，奥巴马的成功更带有某种象征意义。
母亲抱着年幼的奥巴马
今天，Caleb 将给大家带来《以父之名》一书中奥巴马在电话中得到父亲去世消息的段落。
A few months after my twenty-first birthday, a stranger called to give me the news. I was living in New York at the time, on Ninety-fourth between Second and First, part of that unnamed, shifting border between East Harlem and the rest of Manhattan.
It was an uninviting block, treeless and barren, lined with soot-colored walk-ups that cast heavy shadows for most of the day. The apartment was small, with slanting floorsand irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn't work, so that visitors had to callahead from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an emptybeer bottle.
None of this concerned me much, for I didn't get many visitors. I was impatient in those days, busy with work and unrealized plans, and prone to see other people as unnecessary distractions. It wasn't that I didn't appreciate company exactly. I enjoyed exchanging Spanish pleasantries with my mostly Puerto Rican neighbors, and on my way back from classes I'd usually stop to talk to the boys who hung out on the stoop all summer long about the Knicks or the gunshots they'd heard the night before. When the weather was good, my roommate and I might sit out on the fire escape to smoke cigarettes and study the dusk washing blue over the city, or watch white people from the better neighborhoods walk their dogs down our block to let the animals defecate on our curbs -- 'Scoop the poop, you bastards!' my roommate would shout with impressive rage, and we'd laugh at the faces of both master and beast, grim and unapologetic as they hunkered down to do the deed.
I enjoyed such moments -- but only in brief. If the talk began to wander, or cross the border into familiarity, I would soon find reason to excuse myself. I had grown too comfortable in my solitude, the safest place I knew...
It must have been a month or so later, on a cold, dreary November morning, the sun faint behind a gauze of clouds, that the other call came. I was in the middle of making myself breakfast, with coffee on the stove and two eggs in the skillet, when my roommate handed me the phone. the line was thick with static.
'Barry? Is this you?' 'Yes....Who's this?' 'Yes, Barry...this is your Aunt Jane. In Nairobi. Can you hear me?' 'I'm sorry -- who did you say you were?' 'Aunt Jane. Listen, Barry, your father is dead. He is killed in a car accident. Hello? Can you hear me? I say, your father is dead. Barry, please call your uncle in Boston and tell him. I can't talk now, okay, Barry. I will try to call you again....'
That was all. The line cut off, and I sat down on the couch, smelling eggs burn in the kitchen, staring at cracks in the plaster trying to measure my loss.
At the time of his death, my father remained a myth to me, both more and less than a man. He had left Hawaii back in 1963, when I was only two years old, so that as a child I knew him only through the stories that my mother and grandparents told. They all had their favorites, each one seamless, burnished smooth from repeated use. I can still picture Gramps leaning back in his old stuffed chair after dinner, sipping whiskey and cleaning his teeth with the cellophane from his cigarette pack, recounting the time that my father almost threw a man of the Pali Lookout because of a pipe...
You gotta read the book to get that story, which continues with 'A fearsome vision of justice' and ends with the following:
My grandfather would shake his head and get out of his chair to flip on the TV set. 'Now there's something you can learn from your dad,' he would tell me. 'Confidence. The secret to a man's success.'
- East Harlem - an area in Northern Manhattan (New York City Borough) known for crime and poverty.
- cellophane - clear, plasticlike material
- “Scoop the poop, you bastards!” - rude language used to express frustration at the arrogant upper class people.
- “the safest place I knew” - solitude is not a literal place, but rather a way of existing apart from the rest of the world.
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