America, the taliban and the war throughout and i feared nigel hamilton, the mental of command. Fbi award in 1940 to 1942. Walter isakson, the innovators. How group of inventors, hackers and eakes created the digital revolution. I wanted to look at how we people invented the computer and the internet and how innovation really happened in the digital age. In was something that came out of steve jobs and before that lj to say who made that type of person, how did they have not been successful . The book is not about singular people, but about the team. About collaboration. One of the things i discovered in doing this book is real innovation comes from great teams, not just great leaders. In the 2014 long list for nonfiction also include john mark, tennessee williams, not pilgrimage of the flash, age of ambition, chasing fortune commensurate than faith in the new china and matthew stewart, nation scott, the radical origins of the american republic. By the lame card sat on the table here. I think americas founders have been kidnapped. Ill just tell you right now that in my view and i will justify this later the christian nation men is worse than a falsehood or misinterpretation. I see it as something above the trail of the American Revolution and it represents precisely the thing thomas jefferson, thomas paine and others were fighting against. The final two title selected to the National Book awards long list for nonfiction. The next, president obamas halfbrother talks about his relationship the president industries Barack Obamas take on their history it appears from transfer my father. This is a little over an hour. At evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to barnes and noble. Mark obama ndesandjo, our special guest this evening is the halfbrother of president barack obama. In his new book mark offers another terms of their father, once married to baracks mother denmarks jewishamerican mother, ruth. A kenyan born american pianist, writer of businessmen, mark uses talents to work with orphans and is donating a portion of the profits of this book to promote Art Education among needy children around the globe. Please join me in welcoming mark obama ndesandjo. [applause] hello, everyone. How are you doing today . I am so very honored to be here at barnes noble. This is the first time in the United States than i am overwhelmed by the interest as well as i guess ive got to stay here. Okay, its not okay . Okay, great. My book is an obamas journey by discovery through cross cultures. The reason i wrote this book was to tell my story without having other people teleport me. Its also about my family. Many United Nations of swords. But also a family that tries to make a difference in its own ways. My story actually begins about 50 years ago when my father, barack obama senior went two for why he cannot is where he met sally ann dunham, the president s mother and they sell them of and got married. Shortly after that iraq was conceived, my brother, barack. My big brother, barack. After that, they divorced as you know and barack obama senior went to harvard to pursue his doctorate in economics. At that time he met my mother in boston where she was teaching and she fell in love. Love is a powerful thing because in 1964 there were a lot of cross currents that were very, very difficult to maneuver and to deal with in terms of black and white really racial relations in the United States. My father went back to kania later that year and invited my mother to follow him, to get. , which she did. She tells me she remembers mark, when i decided to go to kenya, my grandma said you cant build there, receive. Theyre all black. [laughter] below is a powerful thing and they went in they were married in december of that year. She had never been on a plane before, but she was a dreamer. I think there are dreamers all over and they had a tremendous force empowered vitality. Shortly after that, i was born. I was born in 1965. So my book start with kenya. I call it my personal on this discovery across three cultures and those are for a person with the bumpy road, kenya, china and america. So i will start with a couple of readings and i welcome, welcome any comments or any questions that anybody has. Thank you. Is not working. Can i use this . Thank you. Kenya, where it all began. Africa is the place of sublime contrast. It is a view for for the first time of lions hunting and killing. To see a pic of the body of atomic suggested teeth in albany to great blue ball in the sky seems to stretch to infinity was a humbling experience. How do i convey what it means to commit the a beauty in harness. I share the vignettes and memories that pass in and out of my consciousness like sunlight through a time in office. It is an hour shift and blur like a barrage covering over a burning hot growth. Born in 1965, i lived in kenya until i was 18. The scene of events that marked me for life also furnished me with the bricks from which i later built my spiritual house. Growing up there was both wonderful and terrible because they came from a mixedrace family, africans denied me their brotherhood. To my face, children my own age called me up and said i hated. At one point id grown to believe the term of the purest abuse rather like son of a or a whole multiplied 1000 times. Some people use with a casual familiarity with one my favorite is her chair. But there is tentatively at the same effect as a white supremacist. A man would casually ask me. Leave that alone. I dont like him his schoolmates would often say. I was a white for a black missouri mo. Caucasian is regularly. I was black to all whites, yet whites while blacks, with no middle ground. Unable to bond with my Black Brothers they quickly adopted a culture of my white mother and her more polite caucasian brethren. Although there was a point and most would not want to befriend them, others allowed be to make social advances. For a long time that was enough. One stroke slightly i put the pedal to the metal and zoomed ahead alone and selfreliant. The next section, just to give some context, talks a little bit about kenya and we used to visit my fathers Homestead Air lake tomorrow. And it was a fascinating place. Let me show this year. Every now and again, and now who has been to kenya . Has anyone been to kenya . Yes, maybe some kenyan in the audience. Yes, sir. That means hello, how are you . Welcome. Kenya is an amazing place in africa is an amazing place. The sky which curbs about you is somewhat flaky cathedral. There is a sense there that you dont change africa. Africa changes you. Thats sad, when i was young, my mother, my father in the eye, a younger brother david would drive to a lego coviello which 400 miles to nairobi and was our traditional obama homestead. This section starts there. Every now and again with his and set up by car early in the morning and not straight a line drive arrived at her ancestral home. There was a time when the roads are too dangerous for many travels to use with a driver hugging every likelihood of smashing in three parts are broken down us for falling into a huge pothole or veering off in a surface track. Robbers wouldnt bother asking. These days the roads are considerably better and cut across the road and bypass or riccio and my crew. Our car with pass by the Great Rift Valley and mystic mount long enough. I remember spotting the side of the road all the thick bushes have remained to the old chapel built by the Second World War which is now a refurbished tourist attraction. The land return return fields of sugarcane wheat, sorghum, pay weaker mystic woo wiki or Collard Greens would appear ensuring ways of green and gold and with the tea pickers than their children in the fields where white colonial farmers want used circle land to develop an industry that produced that even the world. I was about five or six years old then. My brother david was just a baby and i do not think he came out on the long trip. Except for once when he got very with malaria. In general, someone would care for him back home and count the days until she could hold them in the arms again. I never understood why we have to leave our home in nairobi to travel to this force that where people spoke a language i couldnt understand. Not speaking below, i felt i was never accepted by the african children. My air for her was taken and that was sustainment on scene. Its all strange, all strange, difficult and intimidating. However, they were lighter, more surreal moments. Most nights ago to the local bar, a oneroom house with a single light bulb in rows of benches lined against the wall. Outside were flimsy chairs and tables, lots of year in huge vats of men talking and yelling. The air was thick with a voluptuous way they smell a fermented maize cargo and people thought to be heard over the sound of rock n roll played on the local radio station. My father would forget is that the drink with the villagers into the night. My mother and i would regularly take away to a small storage room where there was a tiny iron framed bed. We try to talk over until tired from the effort she would get up to leave me. Mom, lets go home i pleaded sometimes when i heard the shouts of men, clinking of bottles and the beat of music on the radio. Hush. You can see. That and when we leave i will wake you pitcher gently tuck me in. I did not want to go back to where were staying. I wanted to go back to nairobi which i knew it was used to. I would sleep with the noise the party was deafening. Unfazed by the harsh glare of the overhead light pole, the mosquitoes would take me when i dozed off. One night the clamor was so loud i had no choice but to come out of storage room into the bar. I sublimely makes my father and mother who sat happily cough and chattering. With tables filled with air bottles and glasses limned around me. The sound seemed to rise like a ghostly with an alien landscape surrounded it. I looked around and all the source of the sound, a strange musician, the bugler dressed in his mom went cloth, one bead necklaces and a traditional hot. He defended here potbelly and jolly face her terrifying sight. He was weaving between the revelers like a black santerre without india. I heard that sound again. When he at his wooden clarinet, his cheeks blew up. Dizzy gillespie fashion, to an incredible size. It was as though both sides of his face had been hijacked by shining Coffee Colored soccer. I looked in amazement at the two glistening words, afraid they would first. So tight with the bulging skin. Above those bulbous cheeks his bulbous cheeks whose small as riner to split that shone with the main vehicle intensity of the night found issued forth, highpitched ennobling is it to the very gates of heaven or how he was deep, 30, feminine and masculine off one of the float out to the gorgeous valleys thrusting through the streets like a driven panacea. Just as suddenly the sun would seize ensuring that to the jovial blubbery visage of the old bugler. Mom, what is wrong with that old mans face . I gasped in horror. Its nothing to get upset about. The muscles in his cheeks are worn out. It is normal for him she murmured smiling at me. I identified in some way i wanted to be as free as the sound he made, freely copy the come of mys mother to fly away from the computer and place. The next section talks a little bit about my first meeting with my brother for rock and that was in 1998. It is a very intense meeting. I just graduated from Brown University and the unmarried and urban combat for this summer to stay with my parents. Barack was on his way to harvard law and i remember i was actually a balmy summer i was in my room reading a book, the devil drives by far bodie, a great history of biography of richard workman, a great colonial adventure. Either the crunching sound outside and into a car had arrived. I heard sounds of voices in the door open. My mother was in the door. My mother is a big lady. Shes strong. Shes a mountain climber. Not literally. But she is a person is gone through many challenges in her life and survived. But she was trembling. It was like it was that the notion. What happened and she said to me, mark, your brother of america is here. I said what brother. There have been memories than rumors and stories sort of nebulous things that i talked about a brother i had in america, but i never met him. This is a totally unannounced visit. So it was a big surprise. Anyway, i said my brother from america, what do you mean . Your brother barack from america is here to see you. And i else a sudden, you know, after the divorce id shut out a lot about the obama name. I wanted nothing to do with it because of the Domestic Violence we suffered for about seven or eight years. I refuse to even take the name of, at that time because i remembered my mother and the pain of seeing her and being able to protect her. All of a sudden we hadnt been in contact with other members of the obama family. After his face was like 10, 15 years. All of a sudden all these memories and feelings just course through me. I was thinking of all the things that try forget for coming back. I instinctively said i dont want to meet him. She said he is your brother. He came all the way from the United States to see you. They can persuade you to do anything. They can persuade you to do anything. They eventually relented. I stood up and walked into the living room the living room then i saw this person who looked at that way like me with a huge, bigger afro than me. [laughter] biggame blue legs and he was sitting on a sea, simple polyester white sugar and cotton pant. And he had these big hands. You know, when he shakes your hand if the fingers reach to your elbow. And he was taller than me. He stood up and said hi, i am barack. I greeted him and that was my brother. You know, that first meeting was a little intense because we didnt say very much, but it was like all the skeletons in the closet were clinking in the back row. The elephant finally walks into the room and you have to confront so many names. Marriages can the relatives you know that well. Anyway, barack wanted to talk to me privately and with more solitude. So we set up a meeting for a few days later. This section talks little bit and is taken from not section. That is what happens when you write a 372 page book. Now that i think of it, i wonder why he was reading from the outside as though he wouldnt enter the house. All our other guests had come straight in, sometimes surprising. Did he refuse to enter . There is an invisible barrier between his part of the family and my own. They were the obama clan living across nairobi, centered around the old man of many family members later called barack obama senior. My mother and i had escaped the squabbling poverty bigamy and Domestic Violence that it tainted my early life. It was a sign of how secure i was, but i face the sack at me with trepidation. My mind wanted to shut out the past but it had grown into a menacing presence hidden in alice degrasse. Iraq stood in front of the car. I believe a volkswagen in the sunlight i could see them better than i have the last time. He was tolerant and are than me with a huge mass of unkempt hair from an angler face. His eyes piercing and direct, his clothes again were very plain, a simple shirt and pale blue trousers. Hello, mark, how are you . He spoke loud and clearly. He didnt smile. It was as though he was recently upset. I reached it by hand. Hello, how are you . Wisher camp awkwardly. At the time i sit barack as everyone called her father. Many years later i learned that my brother preferred a rock. He didnt correct me and i repeated this a number of times during our conversation. I looked more closely at this tall brown apparition that appeared in my life. Why so serious i thought . Had he been dispatched an unwelcome but necessary mission . This is the face of the person with secret plans and goals. It was discreet, earnest and very weary of me and my immediate family, particularly my mother. Perhaps an account of what others had told the period from the way he stood in the driveway that bright afternoon, rigid, head tilted to the side i saw a person who was searching for something. It was the look of someone who decided on the verdict is still struggling with uninformed question as we talk later and discuss a good deal, i sensed he was looking for some been in the coming something deep the simple likability among the noise. I wanted to meet you he said during that first meeting. Lets take a drive. It wants to talk you suggested. I still remember my brother baracks words to me. What do you think of our father . What do you remember about him . He peered at me earnestly. All the fears that gets memories yet somehow we remembered our sister sibling and the bitterness of the family breakup. I recalled the drunken rants of barack obama senior and whiskey bottles clanking of breaking on the floor. Some strangers watch by. I felt grateful for the interruption. The few seconds of silence my eyes wandered around the mostly empty room. The rightofway walls seemed to shout out a greasy plates still lay out some of the checkered plastic tablecloths. I remember that barack thought it ironic that he not have located it. The food arrived almost immediately, not hungry i nibbled on a fried doughnut. I remember how my younger brother who by the way passed away a few years before the 90s to make them together. We would drop into boiling oil. Our mouths with water as reluctant to do krispy donuts with their sweet smile. Is there reading my mind, baracks sake in turn is called brown eyes to me. Im sorry that david he said. I think he wouldve liked and i replied clyde to change the subject. Everyone i know speaks well of hambrick said. His brown eyes suddenly warm. The man sitting this offkilter image of myself now that was though jumping a little bit ahead, now was as though my father refused to let go that matter where i went there would always be some relative to appear uninvited in my life to bring me along the memories i tried so hard to a blurry. I was ashamed for my pettiness and pretty much letting history overcome what shouldve been a joy at the moment. Despite the toe i felt iraq was trying to be honest with themselves. Focusing on reaching a higher level of understanding and it is imperative to respond in kind into a tips of lake ice cold water. This offkilter water across from me was my brother, barack. I felt i could hide nothing from him, that there was nothing, but are you indifferent. Looks like me in so many ways. I shouldve been happy to see him but i was not. Like me use mixedrace and mustve been rejected as i have. Like many educated and ivy league university. Unlike me, he fully embraced his african side. Unlike me he was attempting reconciliation that something or somebody, even if not with me and my mother. Thoughts tumble through my mind as i looked at this