Obama Half-Bro Clinches Book Deal

Half-siblings, step-family of president are famous now

(NEWSER) - New York takes a look at President Obama’s far-flung—and now famous—family, complete with a handy PDF diagram and nicknames to help you remember who is who. George, the youngest half-brother, is arguably the (second) most famous, thanks to a minor drug arrest followed by a memoir deal, but there are quite a few more:

• Maya Soetoro-Ng: Obama’s half-sister, from his mother’s second marriage, she is the only sibling he knew growing up, and is the closest to him.

Autobiographical novel details abuse, doesn't mention president

(NEWSER) - 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. More»

His father told immigrations officials he'd be given up at birth

(NEWSER) - Barack Obama’s father once told immigration officials that he and Ann Dunham were planning to give their then-unborn child up for adoption, writes Sally Jacobs for the Boston Globe . The elder Obama had been under scrutiny from federal immigration officials, who feared that he had another wife in Kenya. In writing a biography of the elder Obama, Jacobs recently obtained a memo from 1961 that reads: “Although they were married they do not live together and Miss Dunham is making arrangements with the Salvation Army to give the baby away." More»

A close reading of his immigration file suggests so, writes Andrew Rice

(NEWSER) - Why did Barack Obama leave the United States, and his young son, returning just once to visit the future president? The Immigration and Naturalization Service file on the elder Obama , obtained by the Arizona Independent through a FOIA request, sheds some light on the mystery. On Capital New York , Andrew Rice offers his thoughts after a close reading of the file. His conclusion: "Racism drove the president's father from the United States," in particular, the problem that American officials had with Obama's "fooling around with white women." More»

He remembers being warned that people wouldn't like him

(NEWSER) - Pundits love to offer up psychological assessments of the president, writes Walter Shapiro on Politics Daily , but few of them think to return to Barack Obama’s own autobiography, Dreams From My Father. Shapiro, reading the book for the first time, finds that no one could have predicted Obama’s problems better than Obama himself did in the book. In one telling passage, Obama recalls a piece of advice given to him as he started community organizing: “Barack, you’ve got to stop worrying about whether people like you. They won’t.” More»