"Becoming" by Michelle Obama: A Book Review
It only took six months, a long stretch where I misplaced the book, and going back to reread about fifty pages or so in May; but I finally finished reading "Becoming" by Michelle Obama, a present from my dad for this past Christmas.
Michelle Obama's rich and profound voice seems to narrate as I read. In the same vein as Tom Hanks seemed to narrate Uncommon Type, my 2017 Christmas present, Michelle brings us into her upbringing as Michelle Robinson, daughter of Fraser and Marian Robinson, younger sister of Craig, in an upstairs apartment over her great aunt Robbie, on Euclid Avenue in the south side of Chicago. She went to Bryn Mawr Elementary School, where she was promoted to third grade midway through her 2nd grade year. As such, she graduated from high school as a young plucky seventeen year old, and was off to Princeton in 1981.
I appreciated Michelle Obama's no-nonsense attitude towards getting into Princeton. While a high school student at Whitney Young, she had a guidance counselor tell her that she "wasn't Princeton material." I had a few similar experiences in middle school, high school, college, and especially graduate school.
There's a lot of time spent on Michelle Obama figuring out her purpose in life. Is she supposed to be a corporate lawyer? She does this for a while after graduating from Harvard Law. She spends some time working for the Mayor's Office in Chicago. She left that position to found the Chicago branch of Public Allies. Eventually she winds up in an outreach position at the University of Chicago, created specifically for her, and that transitions into an executive director position over U of C's hospital. She changes jobs frequently, as we see within the first two hundred pages alone. She changes whole careers, actually! It is the awakening that she isn't actually happy being a corporate lawyer researching documents and preparing briefs for clients that she is never going to meet that brings about her shift to work a bit more directly with the people by working in the mayor's office. This is her place of employment at the point when she gets married to Barack Obama.
Naturally, a big part of my curiosity to get through this book was to see how her romance with the 44th president of the United States was going to be portrayed. And I was not disappointed, ultimately.
But you learn about Ronnell, and David, and Kevin before we get to President Barack. She had a history. She knew other men.
I imagine reading about her bittersweet goodbye to David when she went off to Princeton being a moment that makes Barack feel a little inadequate. But once he gets through that, he'll get to read about Michelle falling irrevocably in love with him while serving as a mentor for him when he is brought in as a summer intern after his first year of law school, and she is a young corporate lawyer at Sidley and Austin.
We read about her taking him out for lunch. We read about them going to see Lés Misérables together, both of them hating it, and both of them bailing on the show at intermission on a summer evening in 1989. (I'll grant you, for a moment that came across as a "screw you" to people like me who would have loved to have seen a live performance of a touring production of Lés Misérables.) I was charmed by her driving him in her SAAB up the Lake Michigan shore to a barbecue put on by a higher level partner of Sidley and Austin, how they had paper plates, hamburgers, chatted with people but kind of found their way back to each other over the course of the day. I was charmed by the pleasant awkwardness between them as they were driving back to the south side. He suggested that they get ice cream. And the events of the next couple of days are well known.
And it is the moment that Barack has to go back to Cambridge, Massachusetts for his second year of law school at Harvard that provides the bittersweet backstory to who we will know as one of the great love stories that one day leads all the way to the White House.
"Before he returned to law school, sometime in the middle of August, Barack told me he loved me. The feeling between us had flowered so quickly and naturally that there was nothing especially memorable about the moment itself. I don't recall when or how exactly it happened. It was just an articulation, tender and meaningful, of the thing that had caught us both by surprise. Even though we'd known each other only a couple of months, even though it was kind of impractical, we were in love."
Then he goes back to Harvard. And they make the long distance thing work. Barack gets to meet Fraser and Marian, as well as Craig.
And in a moment of the book that brought me a great amount of joy, Michelle chronicles getting to go to Hawaii over the Christmas holiday of 1989. I got to read about her meeting Ann Dunham, Barack Obama's mom. I wasn't aware that they got to meet each other, and Ann, who Michelle explains loved and revered her son, was there to tell her son he bet on the right horse by getting together with Michelle.
I was overjoyed to read about their wedding in 1992, and how Ann Dunham did make it out to that. "Sadly, we'd lost Gramps, Barack's grandfather, the previous winter to cancer, but his mother and grandmother made the trip to Chicago, as had Auma and Maya, his half sisters from different continents, united in their affection for Barack. It was the first time our two familes had met, and the feeling was joyful."
I remember I was at a performance of Newsies at Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse with my dad this past February when I reached the part in the book where Barack and Michelle Obama got engaged. It was between the dinner and the bootleggars that I read about them going out to dinner circa 1991 to celebrate his presumed passing of the bar exam. They were at a fancy upscale Chicago restaurant, and he brought up the subject of marraige. Barack specifically brought it up for the sake of panning the institution of marriage. They got in a big argument, as Michelle was notedly pro-marriage. She found out when the dessert tray came out that there was an engagement ring waiting for her. It was pretty hilarious on the page, and I laughed out loud. Touching as well!
As Michelle was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, the city of Chicago plays a prominent role in this book. It was timely that I started reading the book in late January, while we were under that deep freeze. and it was relatable when she talked about the gray sky that takes over Chicago during the wintertime. And we realized how worldly she is, how well-rounded in experience, when she talks about the first signs of spring, and the first signs of summer in Chicago, how it makes living through the winter worth it. It made me want to go back to Chicago. I have experienced brutal Chicago winter, and the joys of Chicago in the spring and summertime, the blue sky, the green grass at Wrigley (she's a Cub fan, though Barack roots for the White Sox), and the blossoming of the trees.
As it must, much of the 2nd half of the book shows how Michele Obama has to orbit Barack on an axis that allows her her own career. She eventually becomes an executive at the University of Chicago hospital. This is where she finds herself at the age of 40, with two beautiful daughters, Malia and Sasha, and a husband who was running for the open U.S. Senate position, and his principal competition, republican Jack Ryan, backed out of the November election due to a sex scandal, and he wound up going up against too far right of center Alan Keyes. We know what hpapened next. Barack served as a junior senator before getting himself elected President of the United States. But Michelle still brings some special insights We learn about her flying out on commercial flights from Chicago to Iowa over many weekends throughout the year 2007, all while raising two young daughters and working at the high school. We see that her husband had a chartered flight, and as such didn't have to deal with going through TSA in a post 9/11 world the same way that Michelle had to. In other words, we do detect a slight amount of bitterness, not misplaced, on Michelle's part.
The fact of the matter is this- as Michelle Obama starts to emerge on the national stage; first as the wife of the man who won the U.S. Congressional seat in Illinois; and then later, on a more profound level, as the wife of the man running for president in 2008, Barack Obama begins to take a less pronounced role in the narrative. She kept herself very busy with her initiatives as First Lady, including the Let's Move! active schools program, the other one for encouraging young girls to learn, the other one for education, and I think there was a fourth one, a global initiative, for helping disenfranchised females get access to school. Barack does not appear as much. She talks about her aides. She maintains a very close relationship with her daughters, Malia and Sasha. She has a special friendship with Queen Elizabeth. But there are relatively few mentions of the 44th president as she discusses her political ife. They had a date in the summer of 2009, going to New York to see a Broadway show. They went out for dinner beforehand, getting applauded by the other patrons. It seems that while he was president, they really had to plan hard and in advance to spend time with each other. They ran on very different schedules. So I guess what I'm trying to say here is I only got a glimpse at Barack Obama the man, and didn't get to know him on a very intimate level. But that's not really the reason I bought the book. I got this book for Christmas to get to know Michelle. And it was an intimate glimpse.
I am happy that I read it, because I now do see that Barack wasn't merely a romance of convenience. Quite the opposite, she never wanted anything to do with politics; it was a romance in spite of his political aspirations. They made it work, even though there were long stretches where they barely got to spend any time with each other during the week. I think it's awesome that they never gave up on their marriage, and that they were able to have their respective professional lives as well as their romantic life, and their family life.
Yes, there's heartache. Michelle has to soldier on following the death of her father, who had suffered from MS for years. She has to soldier on after the loss of her college roommate, Suzanne, felled from cancer at the age of 26. She has to be there for Barack during the national tragedies that occurred during his presidency. The shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, the first time I saw President Obama cry during his presidency, was a moment where he really did rely on Michelle for emotional support. He called her into the Oval Office. They embraced. How do you offer comfort to a nation that had an active shooter situation at an elementary school in which twenty children perished, and six staff?
The more I read this book, the more I missed the Obama administration. And the more I read it, the more I realized this was escapist reading, and I was able to turn the clock back to what by comparison to now seems like a halcyon period of new beginnings for our country.
Yes, the book does have its sad moments too. As mentioned, Sandy Hook. Then there's the murder of Hadiya Pendleton, the girl from the pep band that got to perform in the parade at the nation's capital after Obama's 2nd innauguration. There's the kidnapping of the girls by Boko Haram in Africa. There's the shooting in Charleston at the baptist church.
I could not finish this book in one night. It got so heavy at times, I had to put it down. But it was a fascinating read.
I think that it was actually only cliff notes. It was an outline. She's done so much, Michelle Obama writing an autobiography that's only 426 pages really only scratches the surface. I want to know more about her relationship with the 44th president. I want to know more about what her kids did in their extracurriculars and free time while attending the Sidwell school in Washington, D.C. I want to know a little more about her experience going to law school at Harvard. There are holes. I want to learn more.
But I will say this- "Becoming" by Michelle Obama was an excellent read for the summer. And now I'm in a book hole again.
3 and 3/4th Stars.
Michelle Obama's rich and profound voice seems to narrate as I read. In the same vein as Tom Hanks seemed to narrate Uncommon Type, my 2017 Christmas present, Michelle brings us into her upbringing as Michelle Robinson, daughter of Fraser and Marian Robinson, younger sister of Craig, in an upstairs apartment over her great aunt Robbie, on Euclid Avenue in the south side of Chicago. She went to Bryn Mawr Elementary School, where she was promoted to third grade midway through her 2nd grade year. As such, she graduated from high school as a young plucky seventeen year old, and was off to Princeton in 1981.
I appreciated Michelle Obama's no-nonsense attitude towards getting into Princeton. While a high school student at Whitney Young, she had a guidance counselor tell her that she "wasn't Princeton material." I had a few similar experiences in middle school, high school, college, and especially graduate school.
There's a lot of time spent on Michelle Obama figuring out her purpose in life. Is she supposed to be a corporate lawyer? She does this for a while after graduating from Harvard Law. She spends some time working for the Mayor's Office in Chicago. She left that position to found the Chicago branch of Public Allies. Eventually she winds up in an outreach position at the University of Chicago, created specifically for her, and that transitions into an executive director position over U of C's hospital. She changes jobs frequently, as we see within the first two hundred pages alone. She changes whole careers, actually! It is the awakening that she isn't actually happy being a corporate lawyer researching documents and preparing briefs for clients that she is never going to meet that brings about her shift to work a bit more directly with the people by working in the mayor's office. This is her place of employment at the point when she gets married to Barack Obama.
Naturally, a big part of my curiosity to get through this book was to see how her romance with the 44th president of the United States was going to be portrayed. And I was not disappointed, ultimately.
But you learn about Ronnell, and David, and Kevin before we get to President Barack. She had a history. She knew other men.
I imagine reading about her bittersweet goodbye to David when she went off to Princeton being a moment that makes Barack feel a little inadequate. But once he gets through that, he'll get to read about Michelle falling irrevocably in love with him while serving as a mentor for him when he is brought in as a summer intern after his first year of law school, and she is a young corporate lawyer at Sidley and Austin.
We read about her taking him out for lunch. We read about them going to see Lés Misérables together, both of them hating it, and both of them bailing on the show at intermission on a summer evening in 1989. (I'll grant you, for a moment that came across as a "screw you" to people like me who would have loved to have seen a live performance of a touring production of Lés Misérables.) I was charmed by her driving him in her SAAB up the Lake Michigan shore to a barbecue put on by a higher level partner of Sidley and Austin, how they had paper plates, hamburgers, chatted with people but kind of found their way back to each other over the course of the day. I was charmed by the pleasant awkwardness between them as they were driving back to the south side. He suggested that they get ice cream. And the events of the next couple of days are well known.
And it is the moment that Barack has to go back to Cambridge, Massachusetts for his second year of law school at Harvard that provides the bittersweet backstory to who we will know as one of the great love stories that one day leads all the way to the White House.
"Before he returned to law school, sometime in the middle of August, Barack told me he loved me. The feeling between us had flowered so quickly and naturally that there was nothing especially memorable about the moment itself. I don't recall when or how exactly it happened. It was just an articulation, tender and meaningful, of the thing that had caught us both by surprise. Even though we'd known each other only a couple of months, even though it was kind of impractical, we were in love."
Then he goes back to Harvard. And they make the long distance thing work. Barack gets to meet Fraser and Marian, as well as Craig.
And in a moment of the book that brought me a great amount of joy, Michelle chronicles getting to go to Hawaii over the Christmas holiday of 1989. I got to read about her meeting Ann Dunham, Barack Obama's mom. I wasn't aware that they got to meet each other, and Ann, who Michelle explains loved and revered her son, was there to tell her son he bet on the right horse by getting together with Michelle.
I was overjoyed to read about their wedding in 1992, and how Ann Dunham did make it out to that. "Sadly, we'd lost Gramps, Barack's grandfather, the previous winter to cancer, but his mother and grandmother made the trip to Chicago, as had Auma and Maya, his half sisters from different continents, united in their affection for Barack. It was the first time our two familes had met, and the feeling was joyful."
I remember I was at a performance of Newsies at Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse with my dad this past February when I reached the part in the book where Barack and Michelle Obama got engaged. It was between the dinner and the bootleggars that I read about them going out to dinner circa 1991 to celebrate his presumed passing of the bar exam. They were at a fancy upscale Chicago restaurant, and he brought up the subject of marraige. Barack specifically brought it up for the sake of panning the institution of marriage. They got in a big argument, as Michelle was notedly pro-marriage. She found out when the dessert tray came out that there was an engagement ring waiting for her. It was pretty hilarious on the page, and I laughed out loud. Touching as well!
As Michelle was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, the city of Chicago plays a prominent role in this book. It was timely that I started reading the book in late January, while we were under that deep freeze. and it was relatable when she talked about the gray sky that takes over Chicago during the wintertime. And we realized how worldly she is, how well-rounded in experience, when she talks about the first signs of spring, and the first signs of summer in Chicago, how it makes living through the winter worth it. It made me want to go back to Chicago. I have experienced brutal Chicago winter, and the joys of Chicago in the spring and summertime, the blue sky, the green grass at Wrigley (she's a Cub fan, though Barack roots for the White Sox), and the blossoming of the trees.
As it must, much of the 2nd half of the book shows how Michele Obama has to orbit Barack on an axis that allows her her own career. She eventually becomes an executive at the University of Chicago hospital. This is where she finds herself at the age of 40, with two beautiful daughters, Malia and Sasha, and a husband who was running for the open U.S. Senate position, and his principal competition, republican Jack Ryan, backed out of the November election due to a sex scandal, and he wound up going up against too far right of center Alan Keyes. We know what hpapened next. Barack served as a junior senator before getting himself elected President of the United States. But Michelle still brings some special insights We learn about her flying out on commercial flights from Chicago to Iowa over many weekends throughout the year 2007, all while raising two young daughters and working at the high school. We see that her husband had a chartered flight, and as such didn't have to deal with going through TSA in a post 9/11 world the same way that Michelle had to. In other words, we do detect a slight amount of bitterness, not misplaced, on Michelle's part.
The fact of the matter is this- as Michelle Obama starts to emerge on the national stage; first as the wife of the man who won the U.S. Congressional seat in Illinois; and then later, on a more profound level, as the wife of the man running for president in 2008, Barack Obama begins to take a less pronounced role in the narrative. She kept herself very busy with her initiatives as First Lady, including the Let's Move! active schools program, the other one for encouraging young girls to learn, the other one for education, and I think there was a fourth one, a global initiative, for helping disenfranchised females get access to school. Barack does not appear as much. She talks about her aides. She maintains a very close relationship with her daughters, Malia and Sasha. She has a special friendship with Queen Elizabeth. But there are relatively few mentions of the 44th president as she discusses her political ife. They had a date in the summer of 2009, going to New York to see a Broadway show. They went out for dinner beforehand, getting applauded by the other patrons. It seems that while he was president, they really had to plan hard and in advance to spend time with each other. They ran on very different schedules. So I guess what I'm trying to say here is I only got a glimpse at Barack Obama the man, and didn't get to know him on a very intimate level. But that's not really the reason I bought the book. I got this book for Christmas to get to know Michelle. And it was an intimate glimpse.
I am happy that I read it, because I now do see that Barack wasn't merely a romance of convenience. Quite the opposite, she never wanted anything to do with politics; it was a romance in spite of his political aspirations. They made it work, even though there were long stretches where they barely got to spend any time with each other during the week. I think it's awesome that they never gave up on their marriage, and that they were able to have their respective professional lives as well as their romantic life, and their family life.
Yes, there's heartache. Michelle has to soldier on following the death of her father, who had suffered from MS for years. She has to soldier on after the loss of her college roommate, Suzanne, felled from cancer at the age of 26. She has to be there for Barack during the national tragedies that occurred during his presidency. The shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, the first time I saw President Obama cry during his presidency, was a moment where he really did rely on Michelle for emotional support. He called her into the Oval Office. They embraced. How do you offer comfort to a nation that had an active shooter situation at an elementary school in which twenty children perished, and six staff?
The more I read this book, the more I missed the Obama administration. And the more I read it, the more I realized this was escapist reading, and I was able to turn the clock back to what by comparison to now seems like a halcyon period of new beginnings for our country.
Yes, the book does have its sad moments too. As mentioned, Sandy Hook. Then there's the murder of Hadiya Pendleton, the girl from the pep band that got to perform in the parade at the nation's capital after Obama's 2nd innauguration. There's the kidnapping of the girls by Boko Haram in Africa. There's the shooting in Charleston at the baptist church.
I could not finish this book in one night. It got so heavy at times, I had to put it down. But it was a fascinating read.
I think that it was actually only cliff notes. It was an outline. She's done so much, Michelle Obama writing an autobiography that's only 426 pages really only scratches the surface. I want to know more about her relationship with the 44th president. I want to know more about what her kids did in their extracurriculars and free time while attending the Sidwell school in Washington, D.C. I want to know a little more about her experience going to law school at Harvard. There are holes. I want to learn more.
But I will say this- "Becoming" by Michelle Obama was an excellent read for the summer. And now I'm in a book hole again.
3 and 3/4th Stars.