Chicago Tribune discovers Obama's youth somewhat different from "Dreams"

Many readers have been enthralled by Barack Obama's memoir, Dreams from My Father. I thought the book was a bit ponderous, and two-thirds of the into it, I was saying to myself, "Find your self, already."

The Chicago Tribune's Kirsten Scharnberg and Kim Barker did some excellent reporting by traveling to Hawaii and Indonesia and interviewing individuals who crossed paths with Obama during his memoiric youth.

Free registration is required for the Trib article.

Barker and Scharnberg discovered things were not quite the same as what Obama wrote about in "Dreams."

For instance, despite his claim in the book that he learned it in just six months, Obama never became fluent in the Indonesian language--he struggled in school there because of that. Obama didn't quickly fit in with kids there, as he wrote in "Dreams"; the reporters learned that because his physical appearance was noticeably different from his classmates, the Indonesian students did the same thing kids generally do in other parts of the world when confronted with an "oddity"--they unmercifully teased him.

In the book Obama recounts becoming aware of his race by reading a horrifying account of a black man permanently scarring himself by attempting to lighten his skin hue. Obama said he read it in Life, but no such article was ever published by the magazine.

As the Lemonheads once sang, "It's a Shame about Ray": Obama reflects on conversations he had with "Ray," a fellow black student at Obama's high school, Punahou. But the real "Ray" in fact is Keith Kakugawa, who is bi-racial, black and Japanese. Other students at the time at Punahou recall that "Ray" was viewed as just another of the many mixed-race kids there.

Last month, as I blogged about here, the Los Angeles Times picked apart a claim by Obama that he was the driving force behind the campaign to have asbestos removed from Chicago's Altgeld Gardens housing project. The Times learned that although Obama had a part in that effort, others played a role as well, which is not mentioned in "Dreams From My Father."

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