The
respectable media, left and right, are finally opening themselves up to
the possibility that the story Barack Obama told in his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father has been, in large part, manufactured.
As a case in point, the Weekly Standard's Andrew Ferguson has had to do some serious reevaluating of the man after reading David Maraniss's soon-to-be released book, Barack Obama: The Story. Writes Ferguson ruefully, "The writer who would later use the power of his life story to become a plausible public man was making it up, to an alarming extent."
What Ferguson found particularly "dispiriting" was that the moments most likely to be "invented" were the most critical ones, the book's racially-charged epiphanies, "those periodic aha! moments that carry the book and bring its author closer to self-discovery."
Although I have not yet seen the Maraniss book, I suspect there is one such story that he may have missed. Ferguson certainly did not discuss it, and that is Obama's alleged meeting with his half-brother Mark Ndesandjo in Kenya more than twenty years ago. Although I wrote about this in some detail last year, it deserves revisiting given the renewed interest in Obama's many fictions.
In Dreams, Obama goes on at great length about his first meeting with Ndesandjo in 1988 (or thereabouts) on the occasion of Obama's first visit to Kenya. This meeting took place at the home of Ruth Ndesandjo, Mark's Jewish American mother, who remarried after her divorce from Barack Obama, Sr.
As a case in point, the Weekly Standard's Andrew Ferguson has had to do some serious reevaluating of the man after reading David Maraniss's soon-to-be released book, Barack Obama: The Story. Writes Ferguson ruefully, "The writer who would later use the power of his life story to become a plausible public man was making it up, to an alarming extent."
What Ferguson found particularly "dispiriting" was that the moments most likely to be "invented" were the most critical ones, the book's racially-charged epiphanies, "those periodic aha! moments that carry the book and bring its author closer to self-discovery."
Although I have not yet seen the Maraniss book, I suspect there is one such story that he may have missed. Ferguson certainly did not discuss it, and that is Obama's alleged meeting with his half-brother Mark Ndesandjo in Kenya more than twenty years ago. Although I wrote about this in some detail last year, it deserves revisiting given the renewed interest in Obama's many fictions.
In Dreams, Obama goes on at great length about his first meeting with Ndesandjo in 1988 (or thereabouts) on the occasion of Obama's first visit to Kenya. This meeting took place at the home of Ruth Ndesandjo, Mark's Jewish American mother, who remarried after her divorce from Barack Obama, Sr.
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