Barack Obama

Barack Hussein Obama II (US ⁱ/bəˈrɑːk huːˈseɪn oʊˈbɑːmə/; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician serving as the 44th President of the United States, the first African American to hold the office. Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he served as president of the Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney and taught constitutional law at University of Chicago Law School between 1992 and 2004. He served three terms representing the 13th District in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004, and ran unsuccessfully in the Democratic primary for the United States House of Representatives in 2000 against incumbent Bobby Rush.

In 2004, Obama received national attention during his campaign to represent Illinois in the United States Senate with his victory in the March Democratic Party primary, his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July, and his election to the Senate in November. He began his presidential campaign in 2007 and, after a close primary campaign against Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2008, he won sufficient delegates in the Democratic Party primaries to receive the presidential nomination. He then defeated Republican nominee John McCain in the general election, and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009. Nine months after his inauguration, Obama was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

Dreams from My Father

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance is a memoir by Barack Obama. It was first published in 1995 as Obama was preparing to launch his political career in a campaign for Illinois Senate, five years after being elected as the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review in 1990. The book chronicles the events of Obama's life up until his entry into law school in 1988.

Obama's U.S. Senate Democratic primary victory in Illinois in 2004 led to the book's re-publication in August that same year. This followed by two weeks his July keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention (DNC). Obama would later launch his campaign to be elected President of the United States three years later. The 2004 edition includes a new preface by Obama and his DNC keynote address.

Narrative

Obama recounts his life up to his enrollment in Harvard Law School. He was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Barack Obama, Sr. of Kenya, and Ann Dunham of Wichita, Kansas, who had met as students at the University of Hawaii. Obama's parents separated in 1963 and divorced in 1964, when he was two. Obama’s father went to Harvard to pursue his Ph.D. in economics. After that, he returned to Kenya to fulfill his promise to his nation. Obama formed an image of his absent father from stories told by his mother and her parents. He saw his father only one more time, in 1971, when Obama Sr. came to Hawaii for a month's visit. The elder Obama died in a car accident in 1982.

My Father

My Father (Hangul: 마이 파더; RR: Mai Padeo) is a 2007 South Korean film. The film, which is based on a true story, is about an adopted son who is searching for his biological parents in South Korea. During his search he meets his real father, a condemned murderer on death row. Daniel Henney plays the lead role of James, who works as a volunteer in the United States armed forces in Korea. He asks questions of why his father is on death row and finds out things that he always wanted to know. Then he finds more and more truths unravel about his father and his life.

The release of the film inspired controversy because the family of the father's victims did not support its production. In its first week on release it topped the South Korean box office sales charts.

The adopted son on whom the story is based is Aaron Bates, a licensed insurance broker for his family's insurance brokerage, Insurance Services of America. He lives and works in Arizona and is raising two boys of his own with his wife.

Given name

A given name (also known as a personal name, first name, forename, or Christian name) is a part of a person's full nomenclature. It identifies a specific person, and differentiates that person from other members of a group, such as a family or clan, with whom that person shares a common surname. The term given name refers to the fact that the name is bestowed upon, or given to a child, usually by its parents, at or near the time of birth. This contrasts with a surname (also known as a family name, last name, or gentile name), which is normally inherited, and shared with other members of the child's immediate family.

Given names are often used in a familiar and friendly manner in informal situations. In more formal situations the surname is more commonly used, unless it is necessary to distinguish between people with the same surname. The idioms "on a first-name basis" and "being on first-name terms" allude to the familiarity of addressing another by a given name.

Relationship to other names

Dreams from My Real Father

Dreams from My Real Father: A Story of Reds and Deception is a 2012 American documentary-style film by Joel Gilbert which claims that U.S. President Barack Obama's biological father was Communist Party USA activist Frank Marshall Davis. The title derived from the title of Obama's memoir Dreams from My Father.

Background

The film maintains that Frank Marshall Davis met Obama's mother Ann Dunham through her father Stanley Dunham, whom Gilbert claims was not a furniture salesman, but actually a CIA agent tasked with monitoring Communists in Hawaii.

Filmmaker Joel Gilbert said the film was the result of two years of research. He claims he found nude and fetish photos of Obama's mother Ann Dunham, which he says were taken in late 1960 by Frank Marshall Davis in Davis' Hawaii home. Gilbert compared these to Dunham's high school pictures and says he found the correlation to be "obvious". The Hollywood Reporter said, "He did not use an expert, however, to support his finding."