INTERVIEW
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Obama's Half Bro Says Dad Beat Him, Mom
Autobiographical novel details abuse, doesn't mention president
By Kevin Spak
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Posted Nov 4, 09 1:24 PM CST
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(Newser)
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For Mark Ndesandjo, Barack Obama is something of a monster. Not the president, but their father, Barack Obama Sr. Ndesandjo, full name Mark Odoth Obama Ndesandjo, has just released an autobiographical novel depicting the Obama patriarch as a brilliant-but-violent drunk who beat him and his Jewish-American mother, and while some of the book is fictional, the abuse isn’t, he tells the Washington Post.
“I remember times in my house when I would hear the screams and I would hear my mother's pain,” he says. “I was a child. I could not protect her.” Ndesandjo so hated his father that he dropped his name and took that of his stepfather—until he saw the reaction to his brother’s election. “I became proud of being an Obama,” he says.