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Stanley Ann Dunham, better known as President Barack Obama's mother, passed away in 1995 before seeing her son become the most powerful man in the world. In this weekend's New York Times Magazine, Dunham gets a long profile adapted from Janny Scott's forthcoming book, A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother. The article paints a portrait of a complex woman who traveled to Indonesia with her second husband, battled the customs while raising her son and new daughter, and eventually returned to Hawaii. As Scott writes, "To describe Dunham as a white woman from Kansas turns out...

Stanley Ann Dunham, better known as President Barack Obama's mother, passed away in 1995 before seeing her son become the most powerful man in the world. In this weekend's New York Times Magazine, Dunham gets a long profile adapted from Janny Scott's forthcoming book, A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother. The article paints a portrait of a complex woman who traveled to Indonesia with her second husband, battled the customs while raising her son and new daughter, and eventually returned to Hawaii. As Scott writes, "To describe Dunham as a white woman from Kansas turns out...

Complete title: NYT Mag features new book with Obama interview about his mother: 'She was a very strong person in her own way' FIRST LOOK – New York Times Magazine cover story, “WHY SHE WENT: When Barry Obama was 6 years old [in 1967], his mother moved him to Indonesia. It was a decision that would define his life and hers,” by Janny Scott, a reporter for The New York Times who went on leave in 2008 to write “A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother,” from which this article, "The Young Mother Abroad," is adapted: “The...

The photograph showed the son, but my eye gravitated toward the mother. That first glimpse was surprising — the stout, pale-skinned woman in sturdy sandals, standing squarely a half-step ahead of the lithe, darker-skinned figure to her left. His elas­tic-band body bespoke discipline, even asceticism. Her form was well padded, territory ceded long ago to the pleasures of appetite and the forces of anatomical destiny. He had the studied casualness of a catalog model, in khakis, at home in the viewfinder. She met the camera head-on, dressed in hand-loomed textile dyed indigo, a silver earring half-hidden in the cascading curtain...