Dreams from my Father , by Barack Obama

 A review by Oona King, published in The Times . 

WHATEVER ELSE PEOPLE expect from a politician, it’s not usually a beautifully written personal memoir steeped in honesty. Barack Obama has produced one, possibly because he wrote it when he was 33, long before realising any political ambitions. In essence, this is the search for his lost father who left when Obama was 2, and whom he met only once, when he was 10. When Obama was 21 he received a phone call from Kenya telling him his father had died in a car crash. “I felt no pain,” Obama wrote after the call, “only the vague sense of an opportunity lost.”

Published by the Commission for Racial Equality . 

When people ask if multiculturalism has a future, the short answer is yes. But the question of how we secure that future is more complex than anyone imagined during the passage of the Race Relations Act 1976. At one level, multiculturalism is merely a statement of fact: many cultures living side by side. But minority groups also view multiculturalism as a bulwark against assimilation, a rejection of the cultural blancmange that inevitably discards their heritage in favour of pearly kings and queens.

Former MP Oona King reveals her own struggle to adopt a foreign baby, and the terrible suffering she witnessed in the Congo 

Published in the Mail on Sunday .