http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/03/opinion/03iht-edcohen03.html?_r=2&hp<snip>
Now, thanks to Janny Scott’s remarkable “A Singular Woman,” absence has become presence. Stanley Ann Dunham, the parent who raised Obama, emerges from romanticized vagueness into contours as original as her name. Far from “floating through foreign things,” as one colleague in Indonesia observes, “She was as type A as anybody on the team.”
That may seem a far-fetched description of a woman who was not good with money, had no fixed abode and did not see life through ambition’s narrow prism. It was the journey not the destination that mattered to Dunham. She was, in her daughter Maya Soetoro-Ng’s words, “fascinated with life’s gorgeous minutiae.” To her son the president, “idealism and naïveté” were “embedded” in her.
Yet she was also a pioneering advocate of microcredit in the rural communities of the developing world, an unrivaled authority on Javanese blacksmithing, and a firm voice for female empowerment in an Indonesia “of ‘smiling’ or gentle oppression” toward women, as she wrote in one memo for the Ford Foundation.
Such forbearance is one of her many obvious influences on her son. Taken to Indonesia as a young child on Dunham’s second marriage, then dispatched aged nine back to Hawaii
to become an American in his grandparents’ care, Obama emerges here as a product of his mother’s presence and absence.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm- he was born in America Cohen.
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