Status
Available
Genres
Publication
Vintage (2016), Edition: Reprint, 432 pages
Description
A comprehensive portrait of the First Lady describes her working-class upbringing on Chicago's South Side, her education at Princeton and Harvard during the racially charged 1980s, and her marriage to the future forty-fourth president.
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Media reviews
At times, the recollections of the Robinson family in “Michelle Obama: A Life” read like a parenting manual for how to raise confident, high-achieving kids; it was that warmth and stability that Barack Obama, the son of a single, transient mother, craved, and it grounded him as he ascended in
But racial tensions were never far away, and the first half of the book, which includes Mrs. Obama’s time at Princeton and Harvard Law School and as a young professional, is ripe with revelations about her deeply complicated relationship with her own position as an Ivy League-educated black woman. Ever since her childhood, she encountered the belief that because she was well read and educated, she somehow wasn’t black enough; at the same time, the white world didn’t make her feel entirely welcome either.
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politics. “If Barack was a helium balloon,” Slevin writes, “Michelle was the one holding the string.” The descriptions of piano lessons and drama classes and church on Sunday and drives in the family’s Buick Electra 225 to explore wider (and whiter) Chicago make Mrs. Obama’s childhood sound like a South Side edition of “Leave It to Beaver.” Craig called it “the Shangri-La of upbringings.”But racial tensions were never far away, and the first half of the book, which includes Mrs. Obama’s time at Princeton and Harvard Law School and as a young professional, is ripe with revelations about her deeply complicated relationship with her own position as an Ivy League-educated black woman. Ever since her childhood, she encountered the belief that because she was well read and educated, she somehow wasn’t black enough; at the same time, the white world didn’t make her feel entirely welcome either.
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User reviews
LibraryThing member MHanover10
Very much enjoyed this book. It shed light on another side of Michelle and Barack. I'm a big Obama fan and it's nice to see what they went through during the campaigns and how hard it was to decide if Barack should run or not. She is a strong person and a great role model for women and girls. I
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have enjoyed seeing a loving family in the White House who are more like normal America than in previous years. Show Less
Awards
PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography (Longlist — 2016)
Language
Original publication date
2015
Physical description
7.93 inches
ISBN
0307949311 / 9780307949318