Kaye Adams

LOOSE WOMAN AND JOURNALIST, READ BECOMING BY MICHELLE OBAMA

I’m not a great fan of autobiographies. I prefer to leave the real world behind and lose myself in a good novel. But, for Michelle Obama, I thought I’d make an exception. In the eight years of her husband’s presidency, she established herself as a powerful force in her own right; smart, charismatic and maybe, it’s rumoured, with political ambitions of her own. Yet, in Becoming, she reveals a much gentler soul for whom family, community and sisterhood is all.

She describes, with enormous pride and affection, her loving home in Chicago, where the good oldfashioned values of kindness, effort, respect and decency were instilled in her. A cynical heart might find the first chapters a bit ‘folksy’ but, as she tells how she defied expectations to get into, and graduate from, Harvard Law School, to enter a career in corporate law and then fall in love with the future US President, you are left convinced that if you were to cut Michelle Obama open, you’d find those values in her DNA. From then on, Becoming is a page-turner that pulls no punches about just how punishing the road to the White House is. Viking, £13