Obama's Children's Book Hits Store Shelves

Obama's dedication in the book to Michelle: "Whose fierce love and daily good sense have nourished such wonderful daughters."

Obama's children's book hits shelves today. It makes a nice gift because proceeds of the sales will be donated to a scholarship charity for children of wounded or killed soldiers. What's in the book?

Obama goes on to tell them about 13 “groundbreaking Americans.” In order, they are:

Georgia O’Keeffe (“helped us see big beauty in what is small”)
Albert Einstein (“changing the world with energy and light”)
Jackie Robinson (“showed us all how to turn fear to respect”)
Sitting Bull (“a Sioux medicine man”)
Billie Holiday (“sang beautiful blues”)
Helen Keller (“taught us to look and listen to each other”)
Maya Lin (“public spaces should be filled with art, she thought”)
Jane Addams (“fed the poor”)
Martin Luther King, Jr. (“taught us unyielding compassion”)
Neil Armstrong (“first to walk on the moon”)
Cesar Chavez (“showed farmworkers their own power”)
Abraham Lincoln (“promised freedom to enslaved sisters and brothers”)
George Washington (“our first president”) More at WaPo

Obama's 'Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters' Book Out in November

"Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters" is out Nov. 16. Note that the proceeds of the book will go toward a scholarship fund for children of fallen and disabled soldiers:

Coming two weeks after Election Day, a book from President Barack Obama for some of the nation's nonvoters: inspirational stories for children about American pioneers.

"Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters" is a tribute to 13 groundbreaking Americans, from the first president, George Washington, to baseball great Jackie Robinson to artist Georgia O'Keeffe. It will be released Nov. 16 by Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Random House Children's Books, which will officially announce the new work Tuesday. Knopf declined to identify the other 10 subjects. AP

In Jan. 2009, Obama wrote a letter to his daughters for Parade magazine. In June 2009, he wrote on fatherhood for Parade.

New Obama Book: The Bridge

A new book about Obama by David Remnick (read his latest column on Obama in the New Yorker) gets a positive review. I'm looking forward to this book:

The book has a rich account of Obama's childhood and student years, and includes interviews with people, such as Obama's college roommates, who shunned the media freak show in 2008, but were willing to talk to Remnick, and even to share with him their old, well-written letters and short stories (!) from Obama in Chicago.

The book doesn't dramatically change the public portrait of Obama, but it deepens it, and and is the strongest effort since Dreams from My Father to put him in a kind of narrative context. The narrative doesn't always follow Dreams; notably, it's far clearer on Obama's ambition, which had become clear before he left Chicago for Harvard, to run for office. Read an excerpt on how Obama became Obama by walking through Central Park at Politico

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:

Scout Tufankjian's Obama Photos

Scout started photographing Obama in 2006.

Excerpts From New Obama Book: A Long Time Coming

A May interview with Obama.

Newsweek: Gibbs escorted me to Obama's first-class row, where the senator sat at the window, reading a copy of The New Yorker. Obama looked up, said hello, and asked me to sit. On the advice of one of Obama's best friends, who thought that Obama would respond well to my somewhat unconventional path into journalism, I started to tell him a bit about my background, but I had stumbled over only a couple of awkward sentences when Obama broke in and said, "I have a suggestion. Why don't you just ask me some questions? I want to make sure you maximize your time. You don't need to make me feel comfortable with you; if I didn't trust you, you wouldn't be here." I was immediately struck by Obama's focus, so intense that it almost felt like a physical force.

An excerpt from A Long Time Coming, by Evan Thomas and Newsweek staff:

You take a lot of pride in your roots as a community organizer, in being not far removed from the sort of everyday American experience. And I'm sure you know as well as anyone that there's no bubble quite like the presidency; there's nothing that insulates you from the rest of us like the presidency. Do you think much about this? Do you worry at all about this?
Absolutely. I worry about it all the time. I benefit from the fact that Michelle and her family are very rooted, and almost prototypical Americans, and [from] my friends—like Marty Nesbitt and Eric Whitaker and Valerie [Jarrett], or my friend who I just saw in Oregon, Greg Orme, who was traveling with me, my friend from high school who now works as a contractor—[from the fact that] most of my good friends are not in politics and are not in the political world. I feel that they help me stay tuned in to what's going on with people. But I do worry about it. More than anything what I worry about is the fact that I now change the atmosphere in any room that I walk into, or any conversation that I enter into. That people are going to speak to me differently now than they might have five years ago, even people whom I'm close to. That is something I worry about. And how to prevent that is going to be one of the most important challenges of the presidency.

New Book: The Rise of Barack Obama

A photo book of Obama's career.

The Swamp: Former Chicago Tribune photographer Pete Souza began to chronicle the life of Barack Obama during the senator's first days in political office, when the Secret Service wasn't around yet.

He then joined Obama on trips to seven countries where he captured poignant moments of his life and career. He was there when Obama visited Nelson Mandela's prison cell in South Africa and when throngs of people welcomed Obama to the birthplace of his father, Kenya.

Souza has now gathered the photographs, taken with unprecedented access, into a new book, The Rise of Barack Obama. The book goes on sale this week.

"The book is basically a visual documentation of the rise of his national career," Souza said.