Reading: Candidates' Memoirs

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Obama with his mother, stepfather and sister.

Obama does not inherit such a path, but instead forges one. He is driven to create his own particular notion of race and also must settle on a version of his father, having never truly known him, that he may carry forward. This challenge is made more difficult by the contradictory accounts of his father's character—Obama Sr. is, by turns, presented to his son by those who knew him as an exemplar and a failure.

McCain, too, faces the dark truths of his father, but again, he draws the strength to do so from the legacy of his family. During the Vietnam War, the elder McCain, as the commander in chief of U.S. naval forces in the Pacific, gave orders for B-52s to drop bombs upon the very city where he knew his son was being held as a prisoner of war. "That was his duty," McCain writes, "and he did not shrink from it."

True to his era and upbringing, McCain does not explore the emotional landscape of this experience, but moves on with terse acceptance. Obama, on the other hand, offers the subtle narrative of his difficult circumstances with hair-splitting self-examination, as someone of his generation and unique background is equipped—and inclined—to do.

These distant fathers so inhabited the minds of their sons, there is little room left for the mothers, it seems, although both men write with adoration in the passages they do devote to them. "I became my mother's son," McCain observes in Faith of My Fathers. (He remains so: Roberta, now 95, has often joined him on the campaign trail.) "What I lacked of her charm and grace I made up for by emulating and exaggerating other of her characteristics. She was loquacious, and I was boisterous. Her exuberance became rowdiness in me. She taught me to find so much pleasure in life that misfortune could not rob me of the joy of living."

Obama spends more time on his mother, providing a rounded sense of her romantic optimism. When he became slack in high school and bitter about the chances of the world changing, she was the one who reminded him how much more he could achieve. Still, even he acknowledges, in the revised introduction of Dreams from My Father, that he was remiss in not including more about his mother, who lost her life to cancer soon after the book was published. "I won't try to describe how deeply I mourn her passing still," he writes. "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."

It is moving to see how the parents of these adult men still reside within them. And though it may seem grasping to turn to these candidates' descriptions of their families in order to know them better, such details are a good bit more telling than stump speeches. "Strange how a single conversation can change you," writes Obama. "Or maybe it only seems that way in retrospect. A year passes and you know you feel differently, but you're not sure what or why or how, so your mind casts back for something that might give that difference shape: a word, a glance, a touch." The same could be said of family: We cannot know precisely how our parents have formed us, but we can rest assured that they have played a mighty hand in who we are.