A Singular Woman [Paperback]

This is the story of Stanley Ann Dunham — anthropologist, economic development worker, and mother of Barack Obama. Janny Scott reconstructs a life that spanned Kansas, Hawaii, Indonesia, and Pakistan, following a woman who defied every convention of her generation. Dunham spent decades in Java studying rural blacksmithing and advocating for village craftspeople, often a single mother funding fieldwork on shoestring budgets. Scott draws on years of interviews and Dunham's own letters to reveal a fiercely independent intellectual whose curiosity and idealism shaped not just her son's worldview, but her own remarkable path through postcolonial Asia. For anyone interested in twentieth-century feminism, anthropology, or the forces that shaped a president, this is a deeply researched, unsentimental portrait of a woman who lived entirely on her own terms.