A Singular Woman by Janny Scott

Stanley Ann Dunham, President Obama's mother, has been known mostly by the over-simplified description "a white woman from Kansas", and as a victim of a medical insurance system that denied benefits when she was dying of cancer.  Now Janny Scott gives us a rich and complex view of this brilliant, unconventional woman, based on Dunham's correspondence and professional writings and on extensive interviews with extended family members, high school classmates, academic colleagues, co-workers, and, of course, her children Barack and Maya.  She comes across as having been a free spirit and independent thinker from childhood.

Though born in Wichita, Kansas, Ann Dunham had lived in California, Texas, and Washington state with her peripatetic parents before meeting Barack Obama, Sr. at the University of Hawai'i in 1960.  After the birth of Barack, Jr. and the end of her first marriage, she married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian student at the university.  She followed him to Indonesia in 1967, where her second child, Maya, was born in 1970.

Though her marriage to Soetoro didn't last, her relationship with Indonesia became central to her life.  Early on, she worked as an English teacher and became fluent in Bahasa Indonesia, then returned to the University of Hawai'i for two years to begin work on a PhD in anthropology.  Back in Indonesia, she did field work for her dissertation in rural villages and became deeply concerned with their economic problems.  She worked for several organizations promoting economic development, especially for poor women, and in the late 1980's and early 90's worked with an Indonesian bank to design an extraordinarily successful microfinance program.  With her language and analytical skills, love and understanding of Indonesian culture, and an outgoing, accepting personality, she was uniquely suited for this work.

After a brief stint in New York working on global development and women's issues, Ann had returned to Jakarta when she became seriously ill in 1994. Scott's detailed chronology of her sickness and death from uterine cancer is more nuanced than Obama's assertion, made during the 2008 campaign, that she was denied coverage for a "pre-existing condition".  And in Scott's account it seems that early mis-diagnosis, and possibly Ann's own lack of follow-up on recommended procedures when she was in transition between jobs, were factors in her treatment being ultimately unsuccessful.

Scott's picture is of a very smart, very charming woman who charted her own unusual course; who was separated from her children for long periods but always made their well-being and education top priority; and who did important work to help people who, she recognized, lacked financial resources rather than intelligence and skills.  Ann Dunham's death, just short of her 53rd birthday, came too soon, but she had lived fully.