Barak Obama, Sr., the President’s father, was a Kenyan economist who married an American anthropologist, with whom he had a son. She divorced him three years later. The boy didn’t see his father again until he was ten, and never again after that. All told, Obama, Sr. had four wives and eight children, all raised by their mothers. He died in a car crash months after his last child was born. History’s verdict: “He led a reckless and troubled life.” For the story of another bad dad, read The Great Stork Derby, based on an actual contest in which a husband pressures his wife to have babies for cash and, fifty years later, learns the true value of fatherhood. Read more about the book in NOVELS.
