Michelle Obama’s new book is self-help — but it goes high-tech
In her new best-seller “Becoming,” Michelle Obama’s description of the way the presidency changed her life, President Obama noted that her transition from public schools to Chicago’s private schools became complicated.
“Many people had been involved in helping me navigate a process that began in my childhood and then continued in high school and then continued on in college,” Obama wrote. “Sometimes, it seemed like the bureaucracy of the Chicago school system was far more complicated than it really was.”
She didn’t write a book to change the world by giving public school children easier paths to higher education or by simplifying bureaucracies.
“Obama’s new book of personal essays in prose is aimed at all of us,” said Jon Meacham, the editor and publisher of Washington Post Books, which published Obama’s first memoir, “Audacity of Hope.” “As America continues to grapple with these challenges, we need to look back at the accomplishments of our own families to see how they faced and overcame those challenges.”
Obama’s new book is self-help — or maybe self-help advice.
She began by describing herself as a “young woman of color from a working-class family” who was born in Kenya and grew up in the public schools of Chicago. She said she moved to the United States at 16, attended college and then earned degrees in international relations and law from Harvard and Columbia Universities.
“Many of you might know the story of how I took an internship for six months after college to help the government improve our foreign policy,” Obama wrote. “Or you might know how my law degree changed my life through a summer internship at a Chicago firm. Or you know how I used law school to launch a career in government.”
But with more than 400 pages in her new book, Obama has woven in everything from the stories she grew up with and went through by the