‘Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii. The son of an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister, he attended Columbia University and worked as a financial journalist and editor for Business International Corporation. He served as project coordinator in Harlem for the New York Public Interest Research Group, and was Executive Director of the Developing Communities Project in Chicago’s South Side. His commitment to social and racial issues will be evident in his first book, Journeys in Black and White.’
The ‘Journeys’ depend on the Kenyan beginning. If you can’t read the above blurb and figure that out, you just aren’t...perceptive.
According to the booklet itself, the text was edited by Miriam Goderich, who has since become Dystel's partner at Dystel & Goderich, an agency founded in 1994.
and
He [Jay Acton of Acton & Dystel] indicated that while "almost nobody" wrote his or her own biography, the non-athletes in the booklet, whom "the agents deal[t] with on a daily basis," were "probably" approached to approve the text as presented.
So Obama "almost" certainly didn't write the bio but "probably" approve it.
Miriam Goderich's statement:
"This was nothing more than a fact checking error by me--an agency assistant at the time," Goderich wrote in an emailed statement to Yahoo News. "There was never any information given to us by Obama in any of his correspondence or other communications suggesting in any way that he was born in Kenya and not Hawaii. I hope you can communicate to your readers that this was a simple mistake and nothing more."