Janny Scott on Obama's Mother Ann Dunham

Stanley Ann Dunham was a fascinating woman who was way ahead of her time. She died of cancer in 1995. Janny Scott writes about Dunham in a new biography called A Singular Woman.

Obama Praises His Mother at Nobel Dinner

I don't say this too often, but Obama is an awesome president, certainly one of the hardest working.
He makes the absolute best of everything in the face of fierce, and sometimes highly irrational, critics.
Obama, in a softer tone, pays tribute to the civil rights movement, Alfred Nobel and his mother.

Obama's Mother's Dissertation Published: Surviving Against the Odds

Obama's sister Maya Soetoro-Ng published her mother's work. Obama's mother, a fascinating woman, died in 1995. The book is called Surviving Against the Odds:

A few years before her death, Barack Obama's mother completed her doctoral dissertation. Nearly two decades later, S. Ann Dunham's fieldwork has been published — a fulfillment of her dream, courtesy of her daughter.

"She wanted to make sure that the information she produced would not just be interesting," the president's half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, tells All Things Considered host Guy Raz. Dunham wanted her research to "impact the lives of the people."

Over a period of 14 years, Dunham visited and lived among Indonesian villagers. Her work challenged the prevailing view among social anthropologists of the time that Indonesian peasants were better off just cultivating rice. Read more at NPR

Listen to NPR's interview with Obama's sister:

Obama's Mother's Book to Be Published

A book written by President Obama's mother, who died of cancer in 1995, will be published in December, Duke Press announced Monday.

The book is based on Ann Dunham's 14-year research on the metalworking industry in rural Java, an island in Indonesia. Two anthropologists are revising and editing her dissertation into a book, called "Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia." CNN

Dreams of My Mother

the new york times in-depth piece on obama's mother:

He has described her as a teenage mother, a single mother, a mother who worked, went to school and raised children at the same time. He has credited her with giving him a great education and confidence in his ability to do the right thing. But, in interviews, friends and colleagues of Ms. Soetoro shed light on a side of her that is less well known.

“She was a very, very big thinker,” said Nancy Barry, a former president of Women’s World Banking, an international network of microfinance providers, where Ms. Soetoro worked in New York City in the early 1990s. “I think she was not at all personally ambitious, I think she cared about the core issues, and I think she was not afraid to speak truth to power.”

Her parents were from Kansas — her mother from Augusta, her father from El Dorado, a place Mr. Obama first visited in a campaign stop in January. Stanley Ann (her father wanted a boy so he gave her his name) was born on an Army base during World War II. The family moved to California, Kansas, Texas and Washington in restless pursuit of opportunity before landing in Honolulu in 1960.

In a Russian class at the University of Hawaii, she met the college’s first African student, Barack Obama. They married and had a son in August 1961, in an era when interracial marriage was rare in the United States. Her parents were upset, Senator Obama learned years later from his mother, but they adapted. “I am a little dubious of the things that people from foreign countries tell me,” the senator’s grandmother told an interviewer several years ago.

The marriage was brief. In 1963, Mr. Obama left for Harvard, leaving his wife and child. She then married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian student. When he was summoned home in 1966 after the turmoil surrounding the rise of Suharto, Ms. Soetoro and Barack followed.

Those choices were not entirely surprising, said several high school friends of Ms. Soetoro, whom they remembered as unusually intelligent, curious and open. She never dated “the crew-cut white boys,” said one friend, Susan Blake: “She had a world view, even as a young girl. It was embracing the different, rather than that ethnocentric thing of shunning the different. That was where her mind took her.”

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