Bruce Bawer is one of the great literary critics and political writers of the age (his latest book, While Europe Slept, was nominated for a National Book Award earlier this year). Recently, he picked up a copy of Barack Obama’s 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father, and is quite disappointed:

Yet on whom does Barack’s memoir focus? On his father – whom Barack, against all evidence (which suggests that Dr. Obama was colossally selfish and narcissistic), seeks to portray as heroic, sympathetic, indeed near-mythic. Obama père was a polygamist (and a lousy husband to all his wives), but Barack gives no indication that he finds this morally problematic; on the contrary, he seems determined to excuse his father’s many failings as consequences of imperialism, colonialism, and/or racism. One can, of course, well understand why a small boy – or even a young man – might idealize out of all proportion the father he never met. But Obama shows few signs in this book of recognizing that he’s doing this. Meanwhile, perversely, he treats his mother and grandparents, who by his own account raised him with extraordinary devotion, all but dismissively. At one point he even suggests that Gramps and Toot were really racists – and that all white people, in fact, are racists, and that black people have been so deformed by this racism that black individuals can hardly be held responsible for their own moral lapses.

Bawer’s review is well-worth reading in full. Were it not for the slavish devotion of Obama’s supporters—who make a very big deal out of Obama’s physical traits and personal history—then Bawer’s criticisms might be called irrelevant. But Obama is being sold to us as a man with a great biography (indeed, this life story—and loathing of Hillary Clinton—seems to be the aspect propelling his candidacy) and so that biography is well-worth examining, perhaps more so than those of the other candidates. As Bawer concludes, “As for [Obama’s] social, racial, and political attitudes—well, yes, since 1995 he’s definitely changed his tune about a few things. But how much has he changed deep down inside?”