By some counts, The Story presents more than three-dozen instances of material discrepancy where Dreams fails to align with the facts as Maraniss reports them. Case in point: Maraniss confirmed that Mr. Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, left his father, Barack Obama, Sr., a volatile bigamist, and not the other way around, as related in Dreams.
Dreams also related the tale of Obama's paternal grandfather, Hussein Onyango, who was said to have been detained and tortured in a prison outside Nairobi for six months because of his brave defiance of British colonialists. But after a half-dozen interviews and other research, Maraniss deemed the tale "unlikely." ...
David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker magazine and author of a previous biography, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, published in 2010, judged Dreams to be "a mixture of verifiable fact, recollection, recreation, invention, and artful shaping." Remnick concluded that Author Obama wanted his life story to fit into a long tradition of African-American literature: a "narrative of ascent" discernible in early slave memoirs right up through contemporary classics like Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) and The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965).
But Obama's early life, while sad in many respects, was too marked by privilege -- recreational drug use, a Hawaii upbringing with financially comfortable white parents, enrollment in elite private schools and universities -- to mesh neatly with the aggrieved black literature in which the young author was so well read and conversant. "Obama seems to sense this problem and, at the very start of his book, darkens his canvas as well as he can," Remnick wrote
Question: Can memoirists ever avoid fictionalizing themselves?
Robert Stone: No, I don't think they can, because as soon as you change something from life to language, you're changing it. You're changing it in this ineluctable way. It isn't the same. It's something different. And when you put it into language. Even if memory didn't distort, which memory does, you're still changing it. You can't help it.
Obama used the roundtable audience, as she did yesterday, to describe her husband's understanding of women's issues through the prism of the strong -- but sometimes struggling -- women in his life.
His own mother, she said at the beginning of her remarks, was "very young and very single when she had him." And, Obama added, he has observed his wife's attempts to reconcile motherhood with her career aspirations.
That process has now reached a kind of zenith, with the publication last month of Barack Obama: The Story, a deeply researched, 600-page study of the president's ancestry and early life by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Washington Post editor David Maraniss.
Originally posted by brianmg5
reply to post by FlyersFan
I read the article before I found your post. I wasn't criticizing the content of your story I was criticizing your source. You come attempting to deliver information to an audience (some of which already agree with you, some of which don't) in order to show them all what you found and you use Fox News as your source? Good luck reaching anyone who doesn't agree with you as your source has zero credibility as the political spinning arm of Rupert Murdoch.
Anyone with half a brain isn't going to read what you've posted because they'll assume it's just more lies or bias from Fox News.
BTW I quoted them regarding Michelle's major revelation just to appeal to the "faux news"
haters. Originally posted by jibeho
Originally posted by brianmg5
reply to post by FlyersFan
I read the article before I found your post. I wasn't criticizing the content of your story I was criticizing your source. You come attempting to deliver information to an audience (some of which already agree with you, some of which don't) in order to show them all what you found and you use Fox News as your source? Good luck reaching anyone who doesn't agree with you as your source has zero credibility as the political spinning arm of Rupert Murdoch.
Anyone with half a brain isn't going to read what you've posted because they'll assume it's just more lies or bias from Fox News.
You do realize that Fox is just reporting the information from trusted sources as you read in the article. You could easily read the same article from Reuters if they had the balls to publish it.
Have you read "Dreams"?
Did you read about Obama admitting to the creation of composite girlfriends in his book?
Attacking Fox just to attack Fox is a child's game. Attack the information that they are conveying. Prove that they are wrong. Better yet prove that Obama is not a liar.
Just go watch MSNBC and you'll be just fine
Too Funny!!
Prove that Obama is not a liar? Prove that any politician throughout history isn't a liar... Politicians lying is not news, it's the norm. Name one president throughout our history who hasn't lied.
Originally posted by jibeho
Have you read "Dreams"?
Did you read about Obama admitting to the creation of composite girlfriends in his book?
You're kidding! You mean, all I had invested in his girlfriend information being correct is WRONG!?!?!?! Oh! The humanity! :cry: Better yet prove that Obama is not a liar.
"Autobiographies are not really good sources if you're looking for absolute complete factual accounts of someone's life," agreed Professor Early. "Autobiographies serve another kind of purpose for the person writing the book. I don't think it much matters whether Barack Obama has told the absolute truth in Dreams From My Father. What's important is how he wanted to construct his life."
Read more: www.foxnews.com...
Many of Bush's literary misdemeanors exemplify pedestrian sloth, but others are higher crimes against the craft of memoir. In one prime instance, Bush relates a poignant meeting between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and a Tajik warlord on Karzai's Inauguration Day. It's the kind of scene that offers a glimpse of a hopeful future for the beleaguered nation. Witnessing such an exchange could color a president's outlook, could explain perhaps Bush's more optimistic outlook and give insight into his future decisions. Except Bush didn't witness it. Because, as he himself writes later in the book, he wasn't at Karzai's inauguration.
.
In possibly the greatest advance in literary criticism since the invention of papyrus, former president Jimmy Carter has been slapped with a $5 million law suit over alleged inaccuracies in his controversial 2006 book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid
Clinton's former advisor Dick Morris wrote a rebuttal named Because He Could, criticizing My Life. In the book, Morris presented what he believed to be factual inaccuracies of different events depicted in My Life.[4]
Originally posted by FlyersFan
You give people too much credit. The O-Bots buy everything that comes from Obama.
Please. Oh, well, there's only a few more months to endure it. I guess I can handle it. I can't wait to hear people
having deep political discussions about "Rom-bots"... 
Originally posted by Benevolent Heretic
And it has ZERO to do with his presidency.
(they need a popcorn eating smilie here! )Originally posted by Benevolent Heretic
Oh, well, there's only a few more months to endure it. I guess I can handle it. I can't wait to hear people having deep political discussions about "Rom-bots"...
Anyway, I don't know who these "O-bots" are...
I've NEVER heard anyone worship Obama,
Keep spreading the truth to the O-bots.
Obama may earn millions from taxpayer-funded schools in his new book deal.
Five days before taking the oath of office, President-elect Barack Obama signed a book deal with Crown Publishing Group to publish a version of his best-selling book, "Dreams from My Father", aimed at middle school and young adult age groups. Obama would receive a $500,000 advance payment against royalties, plus ongoing royalty payments. Some in the media have questioned the propriety of this deal from the angle that the President might be unduly influenced by Bertelsmann AG, the German based media publishing empire which owns Random House, which is the parent company of Crown Publishing.
Obama may earn Millions from Schools in Book Deal
In his newly published book Obama’s Education Takeover, The Pacific Research Institute’s Lance Izumi illustrates how Obama’s education policies – particularly his push to impose national education standards and tests – create significant costs for states and are unlikely to improve outcomes for children. “As seen so far, the national standards are costly, academically questionable, and deficient, contra-legal, and contra-constitutional. There is more than enough reason for the public, especially parents, to want change. Yet they are unlikely to get it given the byzantine centralized nationalization process created by the Obama Administration,” said Izumi.
Obama’s 2009 ”stimulus” granted nearly $100 billion in additional federal money to the U.S. Department of Education, yet, as Izumi notes, “the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that instead of funding reforms and raising student achievement, the education stimulus money simply went to “retaining staff and current education programs”— i.e. preserving the status quo.”
And while the significant amount of money gifted to the Department of Education has served to prop up the status quo, it was also used to carve out the administration’s Race to the Top program. RTT dangled $4.35 billion before cash-strapped states to incentivize them to adopt national standards and tests, a move which will cost them in terms of liberty and dollars down the road. “The Common Core standards would further burden already overstrained state budgets. Developing and overhauling state accountability systems will be far more costly and of questionable value during a time of budget shortfalls nationwide,” warned Heritage education analyst Lindsey Burke.
Book Review: “Obama’s Education Takeover”
More investigation is required into the missing Rom-Bots ... 
