'Dreams From My Father' reveals more about Obama than is usually known about political leaders until after they're … - Jonathan Raban

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Perhaps the itinerant upbringing my brothers and I had has something to do with my continued interest in perspectives different from my own.

Jonathan Raban

'Dreams From My Father' reveals more about Obama than is usually known about political leaders until after they're dead. Perhaps more than it intends, it shows his mind working, in real time, sentence by sentence, in what feels like a private audience with the reader.

Dead, Dream, Father, Real, Time, Usually

Same Author Quotes

At night, what you see is a city, because all you see is lights. By day, it doesn't look like a city at all. The trees out-number the houses. And that's completely typical of Seattle. You can't quite tell: is it a city, is it a suburb, is the forest growing back?

Night, Light, Cities, Seattle, Look

We need more urgently than architectural utopias, ingenious traffic disposal systems, or ecological programmes to comprehend the nature of citizenship, to make serious imaginative assessment of that special relationship between the self and the city; its unique plasticity, its privacy and freedom.

Assessment, Cities, Disposal, Ecological, Serious, Unique

Life, as the most ancient of all metaphors insists, is a journey; and the travel book, in its deceptive simulation of the journey's fits and starts, rehearses life's own fragmentation. More even than the novel, it embraces the contingency of things.

Travel, Book, Journey, Embraces, Metaphors, Rehearses

The mythical America?that marvellous, heroic, sentimental landwas an object of faith. It challenged you to make the believer's leap over the rude facts at your feet.

America, Feet, Heroic, Mythical, Rude, Sentimental

Interstate highways dull the reality of place and distance almost as effectively as jetliners do: I loathe their scary monotony.

Distance, Reality, Scary, Effectively, Jetliners