Two idiots - they suit each other.
There is a wonderful autobiography by Michelle Obama and I will paste my review for the local mag - I am sure everyone would enjoy reading it - amazing lady!
"Becoming by Michell Obama
Michelle Obama’s most famous “becoming” is as the first African-American to hold the position of US First Lady: an awkward role that essentially and almost by definition involves a woman striving to make a man look good. But there is so much more to her than this. First and foremost, she can write, and write well. And she is a woman of prodigious intellectual capacity and erudition, alongside a down-to-earth realism; a woman of principle who truly cares.
Her childhood in a less affluent area of Chicago, and the influence of her strong, morally steady mother and solid nuclear family enabled her to bring to the White House a determination to make a difference for the better, to embrace causes that really mattered to her, and to use her new-found influence to further these. She became a powerful advocate for women and embraced the cause of improving the health of young Americans, specifically addressing the obesity crisis. She dug up a large chunk of the White House grounds to devote to growing vegetables, with the help of young people from the local community. And she brought up two girls, protecting them to the best of her ability from the excesses of their position.
Her description of her courtship and marriage is delightful, romantic even, and at the same time realistic. “I understand now that even a happy marriage can be a vexation; that it is a contract best renewed and renewed again, even quietly and privately – even alone.” “Coexisting with Barack’s strong sense of purpose – sleeping in the same bed with it, sitting at the breakfast table with it – was something to which I had to adjust.” It takes some courage for a woman in her position to write that.
She is at her most eloquent on the subject of racial discrimination, which she describes entirely without rancour, but with a clarity that brings home the realities and the subtleties to those of us who have never experienced this.
“[School] gave me a glimpse of ……….the apparatus of privilege and connection; what seemed like a network of half-hidden ladders and guide ropes that lay suspended overhead to connect some but not all of us to the sky.” Redolent of the British class system, I felt, in all its manifestations, but primarily in education.
She gets inside this subliminal sense of inferiority……”Failure is a feeling before it’s an actual result.” And she recognises the obstacles that lie in the way of true integration, when at Princeton College: “It takes energy to be the only black person in a lecture hall or one of a few non-white people trying out for a play………It requires effort, an extra level of confidence, to speak in those settings and own your presence in the room.” “ It’s hard to put into words what sometimes you pick up in the ether, the quiet cruel nuances of not belonging – the subtle clues that tell you not to risk anything; to find your people and just stay put.”
Her story is warm, forgiving and wise; but she is openly critical of political processes in the US with their “lofty promises and platitudes “ and unflinchingly scathing about what followed them into the white House: “the vibrant diversity … gone, replaced by what felt like a dispiriting uniformity, the kind of overwhelmingly white and male tableau I’d encountered so many times.”
I cannot recommend this book too highly – it is a unswerving insight into both American politics and into a remarkable woman, who somehow managed to make the role of First Lady her own with grace and charm and steely determination."
