Michelle Obama's story is an American classic. He became part of black Chicago, a community born of the Great Migration of black Americans from the South to the urban, industrial centers of the East and Midwest. Obama's move to Chicago after law school and his relationship with Michelle gave him a core that he lacked. His is an 'only-in-America' story but not a particularly American one. Slevin combines access to her and her family and friends with a keen understanding of American politics and history, producing a biography that will be part of the foundation for future Obama historians and biographers.įor all of President Obama's gifts as an orator and politician, he is the rarest of elected officials - a biracial son of a teenage American mother and a Kenyan man who was studying in Hawaii. He has the advantage of writing about a relatively young woman (she's 51) whose husband is still in office, so the memories of those who knew Michelle Robinson Obama as a child in Chicago or as a student at Princeton or Harvard Law school are fresh and revealing. But in Michelle Obama: A Life (***½ out of four), Peter Slevin, a former Washington Post reporter who's now a professor at Northwestern, has managed to overcome many of the limitations of the genre. That makes writing about first ladies a challenge for any biographer. They never have the chance to test their abilities in the same arena as men, and those who have tried to break out of the traditional mold, such as Eleanor Roosevelt (and Hillary Clinton), often have been attacked and caricatured. Their true value is often known only within their marriage and family. That's unfair, but it's the complicated lot of a first lady. The rest of her life will be spent on charitable boards, giving speeches and engaging in different forms of public activism, if she wants it. He lives in Evanston, Illinois, where he is a professor at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.Unless she follows the lead of Hillary Clinton and runs for public office, something she says she will not do, we may never see what Michelle Obama can do on her own. He spent a decade on the national staff of The Washington Post, writing extensively about Barack and Michelle Obama, as well as political campaigns and policy debates from one end of the country to the other. Peter Slevin is a contributing writer for The New Yorker, focusing on politics. Includes bibliographical references (pages -399) and index. With disciplined reporting and a storyteller's eye for revealing detail, Peter Slevin follows Michelle to the White House from her working-class childhood on Chicago's largely segregated South Side.Ĥ18 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (chiefly color) 25 cm 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.

Michelle Obama by Peter Slevin