Michelle Obama: A Life

by Peter Slevin

Overview

This is the inspiring story of a modern American icon, the first comprehensive account of the life and times of Michelle Obama.

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. He illuminates her tribulations at Princeton University and Harvard Law School during the racially charged 1980s and the dilemmas she faced in Chicago while building a high-powered career, raising a family, and helping a young community organizer named Barack Obama become president of the United States.

From the lessons she learned in Chicago to the messages she shares as one of the most recognizable women in the world, the story of this First Lady is the story of America. Michelle Obama: A Life is a fresh and compelling view of a woman of unique achievement and purpose.  

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307949318
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/26/2016
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	623,322
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Peter Slevin is a contributing writer for The New Yorker, focusing on politics. 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. He lives in Evanston, Illinois, where he is a professor at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.

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Introduction
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Michelle Obama"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Peter Slevin.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Introduction 3

1 Chicago's Promise 7

2 South Side 26

3 Destiny Not Yet Written 48

4 Orange and Blackness 71

5 Progress in Everything and Nothing 95

6 Finding the Right Thing 116

7 Assets and Deficits 134

8 A Little Tension with That 154

9 Just Don't Screw It Up 174

10 I'm Pretty Convincing 197

11 Veil of Impossibility 218

12 Nothing Would Have Predicted 247

13 Between Politics and Sanity 270

14 Simple Gifts 293

15 I Am No Different from You 322

Epilogue 343

Acknowledgments 349

Notes 353

Bibliography 397

Index 401

Editorial Reviews

Finalist for the 2015 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography

One of Booklist’s Top Ten Biographies of 2015

“Detailed and absorbing. . . . [B]ring[s] a storied public figure to life.” —The Washington Post

“A deeply informed portrait of the first lady and her native Chicago. . . . Her larger story, told so powerfully in Slevin’s biography, suggests she will forever be a force with which to be reckoned.”
—Chicago Tribune

“A must-read. . . . An important new biography. . . . Slevin treats [the First Lady] and her accomplishments with the detail and nuance they deserve.”
—Elle Magazine

“A standout. . . . Michelle Obama’s story is an American classic. . . . Slevin combines access to her and her family and friends with a keen understanding of American politics and history.”
—USA Today

“Thoughtful. . . . Ripe with revelations about her deeply complicated relationship with her own position as an Ivy League-­educated black woman. . . . Richly rendered context for Mr. Obama’s 2008 campaign, when Mrs. Obama suddenly became a litmus test.”
—The New York Times Book Review
 
“[A] meticulously reported, close-up look. . . . A detailed portrait of an ambitious, civic-minded woman with a track record for getting things done.”
—The Florida Times-Union
 
“Makes a convincing case that Mrs. Obama’s popularity today has more to do with events that took place on the south side of Chicago decades ago than with the work of an image maker in the East Wing of the White House.”
—The Wall Street Journal 
 
“Impressively reported and researched. . . . fast-paced.”
—Chicago magazine

“Richly detailed prose. . . . tons of little-known nuggets revealed in the book, offering readers a closer look at the Mrs. Obama they never knew.”
—NBC

“[An] intimate view of her life. . . . The most comprehensive portrait to date of the nation’s first African-American first lady.”
—Atlanta BlackStar
 
“The most ambitious and authoritative book about [First Lady Michelle Obama] yet. Richly reported, beautifully written, thoughtful in its judgments and revelatory in its details . . . a work that does justice to Michelle Obama in a fresh way.”
—John Heilemann, co-author of Game Change and Double Down
 
“The life of Michelle Obama is a uniquely American story, and Peter Slevin tells it beautifully in this deft, revealing work. . . . Slevin also paints a rich picture of Chicago’s South Side during the past century and the family and forces that helped shape this exceptional woman.”
—David Axelrod, former Senior Advisor to the President, director of the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago
 
“Slevin is dogged in his reporting, nuanced in his storytelling and thoughtful in his analysis. He not only shows us who this historical first lady is, but how she came to be. In the process, he reveals much about our times and our culture.”
—Robin Givhan, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for the Washington Post
 
“Compelling. . . . [An] exhaustive and thoughtful portrait. . . . will delight the most ardent Michelle Watchers.”
—Patrik Henry Bass, NY1
 
“An amazing, eye-opening biography that begins on Chicago’s South Side and ends in the White House. . . . a rich, powerful portrait at once revealing of Mrs. Obama and of ourselves as Americans.”
—Dexter Filkins, author of The Forever War 

From the Publisher

03/02/2015
Political journalist Slevin offers an informative if not particularly personal portrait of America’s first lady in this thoroughly researched biography. Slevin meticulously recounts Obama’s inspiring journey, beginning with the struggle of her parents, Marian and Fraser Robinson, to eke out better lives on Chicago’s South Side, and continuing through her childhood to her experiences at Princeton and Harvard Law School, a job at white-shoe law firm Sidley Austin (where a charismatic law student named Barack Obama first made her acquaintance), and her residence in the White House. Providing valuable insight into the trajectory of her life and career, Slevin shows how Obama draws strength from her upbringing, which emphasized knowledge, family, and social responsibility. The rare glimpses of the personality hidden behind Obama’s cool and unruffled demeanor are the most satisfying moments of the narrative, but they are few and far between, leaving her almost as enigmatic a figure at the book’s close as she is at the beginning. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

03/01/2015
Perhaps no first lady since Jacqueline Kennedy sought the White House more reluctantly than Michelle Obama (b. 1964). By the time Barack Obama announced his intention to run for office, Michelle had already scaled back her career goals and settled for less-demanding responsibilities and more time to run her family's household, while her husband served in the Illinois State Senate and the U.S. Senate. Slevin's (journalism, Northwestern Univ.; national political correspondent, Washington Post) thorough coverage of the first lady's life to the midterm of Barack's presidency provides deep understanding of her climb from Southside Chicago to the universities of Princeton and Harvard, all the while searching for her place in a world that she mistrusted. Slevin wants readers to know that Michelle was driven to succeed and to be recognized for her own talents and abilities. He shows that the programs she endorses as first lady reflect the skills she brings to the White House as a former university and hospital administrator whose job it was to extend those institutions into the surrounding minority communities. Although the author cites interviews with his subject's mother and brother, his account relies mainly on news and secondary sources. VERDICT Readers should develop an appreciation for Michelle Obama, the challenges she overcame, and her well-deserved accomplishments. Those who would like to know more about the first lady, her family, and lifelong and recent friends who have helped her along the way will enjoy the author's engaging and authoritative writing. [See Prepub Alert, 11/17/14.]—Jill Ortner, SUNY Buffalo Libs.

Library Journal

2015-01-14
A Chicago-based journalist probes the fortunate yet humble upbringing of the first lady and, in a tedious refrain, her effective blackness.One of the themes that Slevin sounds constantly is that Michelle Obama, nee Robinson (b. 1964), the daughter of a city water-plant worker and a former schoolteacher, never betrayed her working-class black roots on the South Side of Chicago. Although she worked her way through the best schools in the country—her brother, a last-minute crammer, got recruited by Princeton's basketball team, so superdiligent and hardworking Michelle figured she could get in as well—she and the other rare black students at Ivy League schools in the 1980s were haunted by the question, "What are you going to do for black folks when we get out of here?" Indeed, there is a pattern in her early career of genuine concern for the working-class and disenfranchised people from her community and downright discomfort with the privileged status that her Harvard Law degree conferred. Quitting her corporate lawyer job at a blue-chip Chicago firm, she plunged into public service in the mayor's office, taking a severe pay cut. By then, she had met Barack Obama, who had been elected Harvard Law Review president; she served as his adviser as a summer associate in 1989. While the glamour and ambition of her husband often clouded her own admirable work (creating a neighborhood mentorship-internship program at Public Allies, directing the student community service program at the University of Chicago), in time, the relationship offered a good complement to her pragmatic, strategic organizational skills. She is one of his greatest assets in public office and an important foil to criticism that he is not "black enough." Slevin delivers a somewhat fawning portrait, but when necessary, he is willing to criticize and reveal his subject's missteps.

Kirkus Review