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Hipstory: Why be a World Leader When You Could be a Hipster?

Amit Shimoni

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Meet Barack 'Barrie OB' Obama, urban forager and burgeoning ukulele player; 'Hilly' Clinton, noted...

Stephanie Neve (104 KP) rated Becoming in Books

Jun 25, 2019

Becoming

Michelle Obama | 2019 | Biography, History & Politics

8.9

(8 Ratings)

Book Rating

This book is well written. It made me laugh and cry and felt like an intimate down to earth depiction of the Obamas (0 more)

A heartwarming insight into the life of the obamas

So many things I didn't know about Michelle and Barack Obama. Michelle is an intelligent and compassionate woman and it was interesting to see both her and her husbands journey to the Whitehouse. Her stories about love and loss had me in tears numerous times. Great read.

Kudos

Suswatibasu (1701 KP) rated We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy in Books

Nov 16, 2017

An honest look at the Obama years

The simplest way to describe "We Were Eight Years in Power" is as a selection of Ta-Nehisi Coates' most influential pieces from The Atlantic, organised chronologically. The book is actually far more than that, establishing Coates as the pre-eminent black public intellectual of his generation.

Coates is one of the first to show up to discuss all three contemporary themes: the man, the community, national identity. He critiques respectability politics. He writes about mass incarceration. He writes about Michelle Obama and Chicago's South Side. He writes about how Barack Obama was exceptional, in many senses, and about the paradoxical limits of the first black president's power to address race and racism. He writes about the qualitative difference between white economic prospects and black economic prospects, thanks to discriminatory policies promulgated by the government even during progressive times, and about how, in his view, reparations would be the only way to redress the problem.

An air of resignation begins to bleed into Coates' writing even before his last essay, coming into the final years of the Obama administration. It is an eloquent eulogy to the struggles that African Americans are facing and increasingly fearing today.