Andersen's book suggests a different understanding of the situation: Obama using Ayers's book To Teach as a template for his memoir, Ayers reading, editing, and revising it.
If that's how it happened, Ayers can plausibly claim that he didn't "write" the book though his influence on it would be clear.
‘Andersen’s book suggests a different understanding of the situation: Obama using Ayers’s book To Teach as a template for his memoir, Ayers reading, editing, and revising it.’
Where are you getting this? Here’s the version I found:
“But sorting through the more than 200 interviews Andersen says it took to create this book, he came to a startling conclusion: After Obama had to give up on a $150,000 Simon & Schuster contract because he couldn’t complete the manuscript, his sources were telling him Obama finally had to bring in a ghostwriter to put together his highly praised Dreams From My Father for Times Books. He had a million pieces of tape, pictures, memos, notes, and no manuscript.
And he was running out of time to deliver the book.
Nothing wrong so far. Few politicians can string a paragraph together without a ghostwriter.
Unfortunately for Obama, he was caught at a July 10, 2008, meeting in Fairfax, Virginia proudly saying the following:
I’ve written two books. I actually wrote them myself.
Also unfortunately for Obama, Andersen’s sources – all of whom were sympathetic and appear to be at least neighbors to Obama – came to other conclusions. Andersen wrote:
These oral histories, along with a partial manuscript and a truckload of notes, were given to Ayers. “Everyone knew they were friends and that they worked on various projects together,” another Hyde Park neighbor pointed out. “It was no secret. Why would it be? People liked them both.” In the end, Ayers’ contribution to Barack’s Dreams From My Father would be significant – so much so that the book’s language, oddly specific references, literary devices, and themes would bear a jarring similarity to Ayers’ own writing. Even the caveat at the beginning of Dreams, in which Barack points out that he uses invented dialogue, embellished facts, composite characters, inaccurate chronology, and pseudonyms to create an “approximation” of reality, resembles Ayers’ defense of the inaccuracies in his memoir Fugitive Days. In the foreword to his book, Ayers states that the book is merely a collection of his personal memories and “impressions.” … Thanks to help from the veteran writer Ayers, Barack would be able to submit a manuscript to his editors at Times Books.”
http://www.aim.org/aim-report/did-bill-ayers-write-obamas-book/