A revealing new bio of Michelle Obama

Unless she follows the lead of Hillary Clinton and runs for public office, something she says she will not do, we may never see what Michelle Obama can do on her own.

The rest of her life will be spent on charitable boards, giving speeches and engaging in different forms of public activism, if she wants it.

That's unfair, but it's the complicated lot of a first lady. Their true value is often known only within their marriage and family. They never have the chance to test their abilities in the same arena as men, and those who have tried to break out of the traditional mold, such as Eleanor Roosevelt (and Hillary Clinton), often have been attacked and caricatured.

That makes writing about first ladies a challenge for any biographer. But in Michelle Obama: A Life (***½ out of four), Peter Slevin, a former Washington Post reporter who's now a professor at Northwestern, has managed to overcome many of the limitations of the genre.

He has the advantage of writing about a relatively young woman (she's 51) whose husband is still in office, so the memories of those who knew Michelle Robinson Obama as a child in Chicago or as a student at Princeton or Harvard Law school are fresh and revealing. Slevin combines access to her and her family and friends with a keen understanding of American politics and history, producing a biography that will be part of the foundation for future Obama historians and biographers.

For all of President Obama's gifts as an orator and politician, he is the rarest of elected officials — a biracial son of a teenage American mother and a Kenyan man who was studying in Hawaii. His is an "only-in-America" story but not a particularly American one. Obama's move to Chicago after law school and his relationship with Michelle gave him a core that he lacked. He became part of black Chicago, a community born of the Great Migration of black Americans from the South to the urban, industrial centers of the East and Midwest.

Michelle Obama's story is an American classic. Millions of black Americans made the same journey and raised their children in more tolerant environments than they and their families knew in the South. They realized they had greater opportunities than they would have if they had stayed home, but they also knew that those opportunities were accompanied by a different set of challenges. The Robinsons encountered plenty of racial polarization and discrimination in Chicago. Her father, Fraser Robinson III, faced it daily in his job with the city, but he never let his children use it as an excuse for failure.

"Fraser Jr. (Michelle's grandfather) drummed into the grandchildren a larger message fundamental to their upbringing, one that Fraser III and (his wife) Marian and countless other African American parents perfected in the 1960s," Slevin writes. "The message was rooted in a paradox that required elders to hold two seemingly contradictory ideas in mind simultaneously. One was the fact that the playing field was tilted away from their children because of their race and class. The other was the conviction that a combination of love, support, perseverance, and upright living could win out."

Critics of the Obamas have called her mentions of her childhood and the challenges that faced black Americans a continuation of the culture of grievance, in which alleged racism is blamed for every adverse outcome in their lives. It's clear Slevin does not agree, which will make this book a tough read for those who don't hold the first family in high regard.

Slevin does best when he writes about Michelle Obama's childhood and education and the forces that shaped it, whether it was the institutional racism of Chicago or her forays into Ivy League academia, where casual racism abounded despite the schools' attempts to limit it. These experiences were the most formative for her, and they help explain some of her activities as first lady.

Since the Obamas entered the White House, many of their experiences have been so closely followed that virtually anything written about that period doesn't seem new. That's true here.

But the many new details, combined with a keen sense of the political and social dynamics at work during Michelle Obama's formative years, make this book a standout.

Michelle Obama: A Life

By Peter Slevin

Knopf

3 1/2 stars out of four