Obama's Half-Brother First Interview -Nairobi to Shenzhen - Mark Obama Ndesandjo

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• Description : Closely patterned on Ndesandjo's ow...(more)n life, the novel depicts David, an American who leaves the U.S. corporate world after the 9/11 attacks to create a new life in China. He falls in love with a Chinese dance instructor and develops a bond with an orphan who is a gifted pianist battling a serious illness. In the book, David also writes letters to his American mother asking for details about her failed marriage to his late abusive Kenyan father. In one passage, Ndesandjo writes, "David easily remembered the hulking man whose breath reeked of cheap Pilsner beer who had often beaten his mother. He had long searched for good memories of his father but had found none." Ndesandjo said such passages were drawn from his own experience. "I remember situations when I was growing up, and there would be a light coming from our living room, and I could hear thuds," he said in the interview, tears welling in his eyes. "I could hear thuds and screams, and my father's voice and my mother shouting. I remember one night when she ran out into the street and she didn't know where to go." Ndesandjo said his mother often called Obama Sr. "a brilliant man but a social failure." The novel never mentions other wives David's father might have had. Nor does it include a half brother who would become the first black U.S. president. On Wednesday, a week after speaking to the AP, Ndesandjo said at a book-launching news conference that his brother's election victory, among other recent events, helped "peel away the hardness" that he developed emotionally during his difficult childhood. "I became proud of being an Obama," he said. Since the election, he said the extra attention has changed his life, but he has coped by focusing on things that are important to him: music, writing, calligraphy and teaching piano to disadvantaged children. "The simple things sort of help pull you through," he said. Ndesandjo told the AP he didn't want to touch on any political themes in the book. "I think my brother's team is doing an extraordinary job and I really don't want to cause him additional heartburn," he said. Besides the inauguration, he said he last visited his brother in Austin, Texas, before a debate last year with then-Democratic rival Hillary Rodham Clinton. "He came up to me, and we hugged. I gave him a gift, a gift of calligraphy," Ndesandjo told the AP. "I was just thinking of how happy I was and how proud and how much I loved him." "It was a very powerful experience." Another of the president's half brothers, George Obama, 27, of Huruma, Kenya, has penned a memoir that will be published by Simon and Schuster in January 2010. Other Obama relatives working on books include a half sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, daughter of Obama's mother and her second husband, Lolo Soetoro; and Craig Robinson, first lady Michelle Obama's brother (less)