《Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance 》

早晨，喝咖啡时，随手翻了翻桌子上的奥巴马的《Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance 》， 重新读了他2004年再版时的前言，还是如第一次读一样，非常感动。

我承认：每次我读奥巴马的文字，都能感受到他流畅优美文字下的诗意，温柔和人性。。。

这样美丽简洁的英文不是经常能读到的，应该做中学生教材。

新总统是个大才子啊！

这是他写母亲的一段：

The exception is my mother, whom we lost, with a brutal swiftness, to cancer a few months after this book was published.

She had spent the previous ten years doing what she loved. She traveled the world, working in the distant villages of Asia and Africa, helping women buy a sewing machine or a milk cow or an education that might give them a foothold in the world's economy. She gathered friends from high and low, took long walks, stared at the moon, and foraged through the local markets of Delhi or Marrakesh for some trifle, a scarf or stone carving that would make her laugh or please the eye. She wrote reports, read novels, pestered her children, and dreamed of grandchildren.

We saw each other frequently, our bond unbroken. During the writing of this book, she would read the drafts, correcting stories that I had misunderstood, careful not to comment on my characterizations of her but quick to explain or defend the less flattering aspects of my father's character. She managed her illness with grace and good humor, and she helped my sister and me push on with our lives, despite our dread, our denials, our sudden constrictions of the heart.

I think sometimes that had I known she would not survive her illness, I might have written a different book - less a meditation on the absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life. In my daughters I see her every day, her joy, her capacity for wonder. I won't try to describe how deeply I mourn her passing still. I know that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her.