It will probably not vie with the books about First Dog Bo Obama for placement on the bestseller lists, but perhaps it will get an audience curious about the thinking of the president's late mother.
Stanley Ann Dunham's doctoral dissertation Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia will be published by Duke University Press this December.
Three years before her untimely death from cancer, Stanley Ann Dunham completed her dissertation through the anthropology department at the University of Hawaii. Now, seventeen years after Dr. Dunham filed her dissertation, her daughter Maya Soetoro-Ng has gotten the work published.
President Barack Obama’s mother, S. Ann Dunham, was an economic anthropologist and rural development consultant who worked in several countries including Indonesia. Dunham received her doctorate in 1992. She died in 1995, at the age of 52, before having the opportunity to revise her dissertation for publication, as she had planned. Alice G. Dewey and Nancy I. Cooper, Dunham’s graduate adviser and fellow graduate student respectively, undertook the revisions at the request of Dunham’s daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng. The result is Surviving against the Odds, a book based on Dunham’s research, over a period of fourteen years, among the rural craftsmen of Java, the island home to nearly half Indonesia’s population. Surviving against the Odds reflects Dunham’s commitment to helping small-scale village industries survive; her pragmatic, non-ideological approach to research and problem-solving; and her impressive command of history, economic data, and development policy. Along with photographs of Dunham, the book includes many pictures taken by her in Indonesia.
The AP could not reach the White House for comment, but I imagine that the president is pleased that his mother's work will be available to a wider audience. For readers introduced to the president's mother in Dreams From My Father, this book provides the opportunity to discover her thinking and values in her own words, and provides an unusual opportunity to get a book about Indonesian society widely read in the United States. Sadly she (and her parents) are not alive to see the book in stores, but Maya Soetoro-Ng, Barack Obama, and their children will have that pleasure.