Meet Obama's Free-Spirited Mom

Reminiscing comes in profile about his time in Indonesia

(NEWSER) - Barry Obama was just 6 years old when Ann Dunham decided to take him to war-torn Indonesia, and Sunday’s New York Times Magazine examines the reverberations of that decision. On the surface the answer is simple: She was following her second husband, Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian native who’d been called back to serve in the army. But the article offers a revealing look at Dunham’s life there. Some tidbits:

• The young Barack (then Barry) was subject to constant racial discrimination; once, when other children threw rocks at him, Dunham told a friend, “He’s OK. He’s used to it.”
• When Lolo got a job with a US oil company, Dunham refused to socialize with the wealthy American wives of the other execs. She once complained to a friend that Lolo “was becoming more American every day.”
• One former servant for the couple says that Dunham once emerged from an argument with her husband with a bloody nose—though author Janny Scott notes that no one else even hinted at any abuse in the relationship.

Study of Indonesian craftsmen will hit shelves 14 years after her death

(NEWSER) - Barack Obama's mother died before she finished revising her Ph.D dissertation for publication, but two of her fellow anthropologists have now completed the job, reports the Chicago Tribune. Stanley Ann Dunham's Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia—the study of blacksmiths and other rural craftsmen she completed after 14 years in the country—is being published by Duke University Press, and is due out this fall. More»

Kansas-born Ann Dunham worked to uplift the poor in the world's most fractured places

(NEWSER) - Barack Obama’s mother is sometimes described just as “a white woman from Kansas,” but Ann Dunham possessed an indomitable spirit and fierce open-mindedness that profoundly shaped her son. Dunham was a single mom and social activist who worked in Indonesia and Pakistan, and consulted for the World Bank and USAID. Bloomberg looks at one of the women behind the man who would be president. More»

He is his mother's son: David Maraniss

(NEWSER) - Barack Obama titled his memoir Dreams From My Father, but "Dreams From My Mother better evokes his story," writes Washington Post editor and Obama biographer David Maraniss. The president is very much a reflection of his mom, the Kansas-born Stanley Ann Dunham who married a Kenyan and later an Indonesian. "She was a searcher," writes Marannis in a Mother's Day tribute, a woman who earned a doctorate in anthropology and was endlessly "fascinated by other cultures and ways of living." More»

Indonesia's transgender population faces brutality, torment

(NEWSER) - Indonesia is home to 7 million transgendered people who face ongoing harassment, rape, and murder—and Barack Obama's former nanny is among their ranks. Following years of abuse, Evie, born a man, decided to leave cross-dressing behind after a friend was brutally murdered in 1985, the AP reports, in an exclusive look at her predicament and the situation in Indonesia at large. Though the lifestyle is very much in the public eye—a major talk-show host is transgendered—attacks have mounted in recent years, and the country's top Islamic organization has condemned the transgender lifestyle, the AP reports. "They must learn to accept their nature" or "accept their fate to be ridiculed and harassed," says a top cleric. More»