A Singular Woman

Barack Obama has written extensively about his father but credited his mother for 'what is best in me.' Still, little is known about this fiercely independent, spirited woman who raised the man who became the first biracial president of the United States. An unconventional woman who emerged from a conventional time, Stanley Ann Dunham's life crossed boundaries and cultures and confounded her generation's strictures of gender and race. As twice divorced, single mother of two children from two fathers - men from two different countries and races - she built a deeply traditional life for herself and her children, raising them largely in a foreign country, even sending Barack across the world for a better education at age ten. Beginning in a time when interracial marriage was still a felony in much of the United States, and finding its culmination in the present moment, with Barack Obama as our president, A Singular Woman is an extraordinary moving, insightful, and inspiring story of how character is passed from parent to child, and a window into how Barack Obama's destiny was created early by his mother's extraordinary faith in his gifts, and by her unconventional mothering.