Five Stars.

I recently read that this memoir will soon be the bestselling memoir in history.  I think that’s terrific for Mrs. Obama as she’s one of my heroes, one of the very best people I’ve known of in my very long life.  She observes toward the end of the book that during the eight years of the Obama administration, there hadn’t been a major scandal.  In her public life, which obviously is all I know of, Mrs. Obama always conducted herself with grace and class.  A profound First Lady who promoted healthy lifestyles, especially for children, who supported our troops by walking the walk, visiting and helping veterans injured in war and comforting Gold Star families.  And never letting any priority interfere with raising her children.  I wanted to discover how she did this, how she felt about it.  And so I read her book.  And I was rewarded reading about what I’d wanted to know.

Okay, I also hoped to find some gratifying gossip about her marriage.  I wasn’t disappointed there either.

I must observe that this is an exceptionally well-written memoir.  At times the prose, the similes and metaphors soar.  One would almost think that her husband learned to write from her as the prosody is so lyrical at times. 

This memoir is traditional in that it largely chronologically follows Mrs. Obama’s life.  Yes, you will read about her life in grade school and earlier.  Her years as an undergraduate at Princeton.  Not so much about her life as a law student at Harvard, which was okay with me.  Her two-year career as a corporate lawyer in a white-shoe Chicago law firm.  But most impressively, her search for a new career when she discovered early on that public-interest work at half of what she was making in corporate law was her calling.

I loved reading about the family’s interaction with the Secret Service, a lot of inside information about the campaigns. 

Before I read her memoir, I was inspired by Michelle Obama.  After reading Becoming, I am even more so.