Becoming
(Crown, $32.50)
Michelle Obama’s new book is “a political spouse’s memoir like no other,” said Connie Schultz in The Washington Post. The work of a woman who’s finally free to speak her mind after watching her words for the eight years she served as our country’s first African-American first lady, Becoming is an inspiring personal story that also “crackles with blunt, often searing observations about politics, race, and gender.” Some of the candor opens up her famous marriage in new ways. Though both she and Barack Obama have previously described tensions in the early years of their union, Michelle provides new details about the sources of her frustrations, even as she strikes a nice balance throughout between “telling the truth of her challenges” and “repeatedly acknowledging her lucky life.”
Largely because of its honesty, Becoming is “one of those rare political books” that flashes some “truly excellent” writing, said Danielle Kurtzleben in NPR.org. Obama’s description of her childhood on Chicago’s South Side is rich in resonant detail about her family’s working-class values and how her parents’ support helped her push past a guidance counselor’s skepticism and win acceptance to Princeton and the path to a successful law career. Here and there, a didactic aside stops the reader like “a stray piece of eggshell in an otherwise delicious bite of cake.” But the particulars of her story are fascinating, and when she meets Barack Obama, we get a clear sense of the attraction between them but also of how her meticulous nature sometimes clashed with his easy optimism. Their struggles to conceive, after she suffered a miscarriage, became a real test. He was often away, serving as a state senator, as she prepared for in vitro fertilization by sticking herself daily with a needle. “None of this was his fault,” she writes. “But it wasn’t equal, either.”
“For anyone who’s wondering: No, she’s not running,” said Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times. Obama emphatically rejects the possibility of mounting her own bid for elected office. “I’ve never been a fan of politics,” she writes, “and my experience over the last 10 years has done little to change that.” Not that she’s been embittered: Though she forcefully criticizes President Trump for his inflammatory rhetoric and she frets about the future, she continues to express amazement that she and her husband ascended to the White House in the first place. Even when she worries, this is a woman who’s “clearly struggling to reconcile the clear-eyed realism of her upbringing with the glamorous, previously unthinkable life she has today.”