Summary

At the beginning of Chapter 1, Barack Obama II describes himself as a 21-year old student at Columbia University when he receives a call from Kenya. His father, Barack Obama I, had died. Aside from the first two years of his life and brief visit when he was ten and living in Hawaii, Obama spent little time with his father. Most of what he knew of his father came from idealized stories told to him by his mother, Ann Dunham, and his grandparents, Stanley (Gramps) and Madelyn Dunham (Toot). Ann Dunham's story about Obama Sr. was that they met, married, and parted only so that Obama Sr. could pursue graduate studies at Harvard and then return to Kenya to serve his country.

Reflecting on these stories, Obama now wonders how it was even possible that a black Kenyan and a white, American woman...