Becoming – by Michelle Obama is an autobiographical narration of her life from the South side of Chicago where she lived a very middle-class life in a two bedroom apartment with her parents and brother to the high profile life as the First lady of the United States.
Her well planned and disciplined life, her choices of projects to work on are all inspiration for ladies to plan their life for independence and enable themselves to be the change they want to see in the society.
The book gives us a sneak peek into the political sentiments and major issues facing the American society as well as the political propaganda driving the Democratic and Republican campaigns.
Michelle Obama describes with equal candor her childhood days in ‘Euclid Avenue’ in Chicago when she excelled in school , her college days at Princeton as also her early years of marriage with Barak Obama trying to balance her career with the political ambition of her husband. She has successfully portrayed the transition from Euclid Avenue to White House capturing well the subtle nuances involved in loosing once privacy to popularity and media attention.
Some excerpts from the book that I underlined:
“And If every sadness, when it came , turned out at least to be redemptive in the end.”
“Dominance, even the treat of it, is a form of dehumanization. It’s the ugliest kind of power.”
“You may live in the world as it is, but you can still work to create the world as it should be.”
“Failure is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result. It’s vulnerability that breeds with self-doubt and then is escalated, often deliberately, by fear.”
And the best of all excerpts is :
“I tried to communicate the one message about myself and my station in the world that I felt might really mean something. Which was that I knew ‘invisibility’. I’d lived invisibility. I came from a history of invisibility. I liked to mention that I was the great-great-granddaughter of a slave named Jim Robinson, who was probably buried in an unmarked grave somewhere on a South Carolina plantation. And in standing at a lectern in front of students who were thinking about the future, I offered testament to the idea that it was possible, at least in some ways, to overcome invisibility.”
That according to me is the gist of the Book.
After reading the book , I felt safer to live in this country and have my kids build their life here. With all the negative sentiments against immigrants in this country, the book assured to me that there is still HOPE.
