I got that impression from the Duke U. Press link that YOU cited, which quotes all those reviewers praising her work to high heaven. Pardon me for reading what you post.
Why are you getting so snippy? I’m not your enemy. I’m a fellow conservative. I’m not being snippy w you. If wd be nice if we cd converse in a calm, respectful manner. Here’s hoping.
None of the quotes I cited called SADO’s work ‘groundbreaking’. I checked. In fact, the praise was fairly tepid. This was *after* her son became POTUS. Can you imagine how unenthused the reviews wd have been, had they existed, prior to Obama’s meteoric rise?
It’s interesting too that despite Obama’s fame, only three ppl cd be found to endorse the thesis-turned-book. Here are the three:
Donald Brenneis
Robert W. Hefner
Maya Soetoro-Ng
So the book was endorsed by SADO’s daughter, one of the book’s contributors, and a man named Donald Brenneis. Here’s what Brenneis had to say:
“Surviving against the Odds is a work of very fine scholarship grounded in a deep understanding of Indonesia. Reading it, I learned a great deal about economic anthropology, blacksmithing (across a range of dimensions, from the supernatural to metallurgy), local life and labor in the Javanese village of Kajar, and the remarkable welter of development schemes and projects in play during the long period of S. Ann Dunham’s research. Dunham knew the arcane world of development very well and her account of it is fascinating and important.”
That’s not a great ‘endorsement’. He calls the subject “arcane”, and the account of it “important”. If this is the best he can do for the mother of the POTUS, can you begin to imagine what he’d have said if he were reviewing the work of a nobody? I can, but I’ll leave it at that.
http://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ViewProduct.php?productid=46699