Becoming - Michelle Obama

Book Rating 2 of 5

The book is easy to read. Its not very memorable. Sometimes Michelle Obama lightly grinds a political axe. Mostly she just talks about here life.

The first half of the book is much more interesting than the second half. Somewhere in the middle of the book her college roommate dies of cancer and around the same time father dies from complications related to his seemingly untreated multiple sclerosis. I felt pretty bad for her during that section.

I felt like Princeton was sort of a odd choice for college. I mean clearly Michelle Obama is very smart and her brother went there. But I get the sense in the book that she’s never comfortable with the white students. I’ve never been to Princeton but my guess is the white kids there aren’t as economically diverse as say the kids you’d find at say University of IL, I wonder if she would have had a better college experience if she had looked a little more. It kind of feels like she was reaching a little bit to much for the status of the Ivy League. But I can’t fault her for going there, she probably got a great education, so I don’t think it was a bad choice, I just wonder if she’s curious of how a different choice would have turned out.

I’d never read a presidential memoir before so getting some information about what its actually like to live in the white house was a little interesting. Seeing a picture in the middle of the book of President Obama going to his kids basketball game was an interesting juxtaposition.

Oddly the book made me think a little less of Barack Obama. He feels like one of those guys who’s just kind of into his own thing. I’m not really sure I felt like he really made time for things outside his own set of goals. For example, he leaves while they are married and spends a bunch of time (6 weeks?) by himself in Hawaii so he can finish is book. I felt like it was kind of a lame move.

Anyway the book is a nice light read, but its just a little too filtered to really pull you in. Michelle is a classy woman and she doesn’t sling any mud and she’s not willing to overshare the type of stories that would make anyone look bad. You have to read between the lines on the people she doesn’t like sometimes.
Becoming is just a little bit boring.