President Barack Obama's half-brother is releasing an autobiography in February that details the domestic abuse from their father and recounts sporadic, but intense encounters with his older brother over the years, the Associated Press reported.
The 500-page book seeks to raise awareness of domestic abuse by using his family's story as an example.
In "Cultures: My Odyssey of Self-Discovery", Mark Obama Ndesandjo revisits the theme of domestic abuse from his earlier semiautobiographical novel, "Nairobi to Shenzhen: A Novel of Love in the East," which featured an abusive parent patterned on their late father.
According to the AP, the self-published book also tries to clarify and explain some points from the president's bestselling 1995 memoir, "Dreams From My Father," in which Obama seeks to understand his absentee father's life after learning of his death in a car crash in 1982 at age 46.
In his book, Ndesandjo lists a number of alleged factual errors and quotes incorrectly attributed to Ndesandjo's mother in Obama's book.
"It's a correction. A lot of the stuff that Barack wrote is wrong in that book and I can understand that because to me for him the book was a tool for fashioning an identity and he was using composites," Ndesandjo said. "I wanted to bring it up because first of all I wanted the record to be straight. I wanted to tell my own story, not let people tell it for me."
Launching the book in Guangzhou on Thursday, Ndesandjo said his talks about private matters in public have not always been welcomed by the president's relatives, the AP reported.
"Right now it's cold and I think part of the reason is because of my writing," he told the AP. "My writing has alienated some people in my family.
"I hope that my brother and I can really hug each other after he's president and we can be a family again," Ndesandjo said.
Ndesandjo talks about his alcoholic father's beatings on his mother and recalls an incident where his father held a knife to his mother's throat after she took out a restraining order against him, the AP reported.
Like the president, Ndesandjo also has a white American mother, Ruth Ndesandjo, a Jewish woman who was Barack Obama Sr.'s third wife. The book recounts Ndesandjo's first encounter with Obama, who was visiting Kenya in 1988.
"Barack thought I was too white and I thought he was too black," Ndesandjo said. "He was an American searching for his African roots, I was a Kenyan, I'm an American, but I was living in Kenya, searching for my white roots."
Ndesandjo, 48, has lived for 12 years in the southern Chinese boomtown of Shenzhen, next door to Hong Kong. He moved there to teach English after losing his job when the U.S. economy cratered and now works as a consultant, the AP reported.
