Author: Michelle Obama
Genre: Autobiography, Memoir
Rating: 5/5
Verdict: One word - Wow! Buy it - It's a keeper.
Let me start by just saying that I'm pretty sure I'm going to be reading this book again and again for years to come. When I feel depressed, when I am in dire need of hope, something to cling on to, when I want to be uplifted, motivated and inspired. I've always loved, respected and admired Michelle Obama. Her intelligence, grace, class and commitment to her country, her husband and kids has been very inspiring. After reading this book, my respect and admiration for her has increased by leaps and bounds.
Becoming is an honest, endearing and passionate memoir about Michelle's life right from her journey from Chicago to the White House. Michelle takes us back to her childhood days in the South Side of Chicago where she was raised by devoted parents, her father, a blue collar city worker and a mother who dedicated her life for Michelle and her older brother Craig. It was inspiring to see how her entire family (extended family too) stressed the importance of good education and exposed her to a variety of things from very early on - Something that I have always strongly believed in and extremely thankful for.
Michelle's writing is so intimate and powerful that makes you feel like you are sitting right across from her while she reveals her life story. She keeps you turning pages rapidly as she takes us through her early years in Chicago, through high school and college. I really enjoyed reading about Michelle and Barack Obama's first encounter, and their subsequent courtship period where she describes about Barack Obama's passion for reading and his core values that made her fall in love with him. What was more heart warming to read was that she was not at all uncomfortable to reveal that they worked really hard on their marriage, and that they even had gone to marital counseling when things got out of both their control sometimes. Revealing such personal details so honestly is not an easy task to do and Michelle has done it remarkably well.
The more I read, the more I realized that Michelle is so much like many of us, with dreams, doubts, the challenges with raising kids while having a husband who had to be away most of the time, the compromises, the everyday struggles of juggling school pick-ups, meal times, a full-time job and finally relenting to hiring a person to cook dinners at home. I love that the book has a bit of everything. Michelle's determination to succeed being a woman of color, her love for Barack and standing by him being his rock during ups and downs and the heart of their hearts - their girls - Sasha and Malia. I loved reading every bit about Barack as a father and their time together as a family. The book gives us a glimpse of their years in the White House and despite all the fame and frenzy, Michelle talks about how they were forced to live in a bubble always under constant scrutiny, security and surveillance and about how she and Barack struggled to give their daughters a "normal" life. I also loved how she worked towards issues that bothered her the most and her and Barack's accomplishments during their time at the White House. The photographs in the book are a treasure to see.
I got so swept into reading this book that I read it until the wee hours of the morning and finished it. This book will go into my library collection as one of the best I have ever read. Thank you Michelle for sharing your life story with us and for BECOMING.
Some of my favorite quotes from the book:
"You’ve got to be twice as good to get half as far."
"When they go low, we go high."
"Life was teaching me that progress and change happen slowly. Not in two years, four years, or even a lifetime. We were planting seeds of change, the fruit of which we might never see. We had to be patient."
Genre: Autobiography, Memoir
Rating: 5/5
Verdict: One word - Wow! Buy it - It's a keeper.
Let me start by just saying that I'm pretty sure I'm going to be reading this book again and again for years to come. When I feel depressed, when I am in dire need of hope, something to cling on to, when I want to be uplifted, motivated and inspired. I've always loved, respected and admired Michelle Obama. Her intelligence, grace, class and commitment to her country, her husband and kids has been very inspiring. After reading this book, my respect and admiration for her has increased by leaps and bounds.
Becoming is an honest, endearing and passionate memoir about Michelle's life right from her journey from Chicago to the White House. Michelle takes us back to her childhood days in the South Side of Chicago where she was raised by devoted parents, her father, a blue collar city worker and a mother who dedicated her life for Michelle and her older brother Craig. It was inspiring to see how her entire family (extended family too) stressed the importance of good education and exposed her to a variety of things from very early on - Something that I have always strongly believed in and extremely thankful for.
Michelle's writing is so intimate and powerful that makes you feel like you are sitting right across from her while she reveals her life story. She keeps you turning pages rapidly as she takes us through her early years in Chicago, through high school and college. I really enjoyed reading about Michelle and Barack Obama's first encounter, and their subsequent courtship period where she describes about Barack Obama's passion for reading and his core values that made her fall in love with him. What was more heart warming to read was that she was not at all uncomfortable to reveal that they worked really hard on their marriage, and that they even had gone to marital counseling when things got out of both their control sometimes. Revealing such personal details so honestly is not an easy task to do and Michelle has done it remarkably well.
The more I read, the more I realized that Michelle is so much like many of us, with dreams, doubts, the challenges with raising kids while having a husband who had to be away most of the time, the compromises, the everyday struggles of juggling school pick-ups, meal times, a full-time job and finally relenting to hiring a person to cook dinners at home. I love that the book has a bit of everything. Michelle's determination to succeed being a woman of color, her love for Barack and standing by him being his rock during ups and downs and the heart of their hearts - their girls - Sasha and Malia. I loved reading every bit about Barack as a father and their time together as a family. The book gives us a glimpse of their years in the White House and despite all the fame and frenzy, Michelle talks about how they were forced to live in a bubble always under constant scrutiny, security and surveillance and about how she and Barack struggled to give their daughters a "normal" life. I also loved how she worked towards issues that bothered her the most and her and Barack's accomplishments during their time at the White House. The photographs in the book are a treasure to see.
I got so swept into reading this book that I read it until the wee hours of the morning and finished it. This book will go into my library collection as one of the best I have ever read. Thank you Michelle for sharing your life story with us and for BECOMING.
Some of my favorite quotes from the book:
"You’ve got to be twice as good to get half as far."
"When they go low, we go high."
"Life was teaching me that progress and change happen slowly. Not in two years, four years, or even a lifetime. We were planting seeds of change, the fruit of which we might never see. We had to be patient."
