The book opens when Barack Obama is twenty-one and a student living a solitary life in a small, shabby apartment in New York. His Aunt Jane, from Nairobi, Kenya, calls him to tell him that his fatherhas died in a car accident. Obama was only two when his father left him as a child in Hawaii, so much of what he knows of his father comes from the stories (some of them not always completely true) his mother and her parents told him as he grew up.

Obama's paternal grandfather, whom he calls "Gramps," told the story of Obama's father dangling a man over the side of a bridge after the man lost his pipe, for example. Ann, Obama's mother, did her best as always to soften these stories by emphasizing how upright and uncompromising a man Obama's father was.Another story Gramps would tell was the time Obama's father was invited to sing African songs for a festival, only to discover that he would have to do so before a big audience. Although Obama's father wasn't much of a singer, he had so much confidence that he received even more applause than the professional singer who preceded him.