Obama's Mother Snags a Book Deal

I know you're saying isn't his mother long deceased? Well, yes, she is. But being dead apparently doesn't preclude you getting a book deal considering you're the woman who brought The One into this world.

Duke University Press will publish a book by S. Ann Dunham, the mother of President Barack Obama, in December 2009. Dunham, who died in 1995, completed the dissertation in anthropology for the University of Hawaii in 1992.

The book is based on Dunham’s research, over a period of 14 years, among the rural craftsmen of Java. At the request of Dunham’s daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng, two anthropologists -- Alice G. Dewey, Dunham’s graduate adviser, and Nancy I. Cooper, a fellow graduate student -- have revised and edited the dissertation, which is called “Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia.”

“Surviving against the Odds” centers on the metalworking industries in the Javanese village of Kajar, and how they offer a viable economic alternative in a rice-dependent area of rural Southeast Asia.

Maybe they should call it Dreams of His Mother.

Seems to me if this work was so groundbreaking someone would have published it in the past 17 years.

“It is a great privilege for Duke University Press to be publishing this remarkable work by Ann Dunham,” said Ken Wissoker, editorial director of Duke University Press. “Her global perspective and obvious respect for other people’s intelligence and self-direction is a model we all can learn from. Her children clearly have.”