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Stephanie Neve (104 KP) rated Becoming in Books

Jun 25, 2019  
Becoming
Becoming
Michelle Obama | 2019 | Biography, History & Politics
9
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.
  
Becoming (2020)
Becoming (2020)
2020 | Documentary
10
10.0 (1 Ratings)
Perhaps I'm biased but I love Michelle Obama. She's the type of woman I aspire to be. I've read her memoir and this documentary is just a deeper dive into who she is as a person, as a role model, as a mother, as a wife, as a black woman living in the United States. She is fierce and passionate and it radiates off the screen throughout this film.

Not only is this film beautifully shot, but the majority of its production team are women and I think that's equally as incredible. More than anything, this film provides some hope. We are in some unprecedented times in various ways, but she is confident we will persevere and I believe her.

Michelle Obama is a gift and it's incredible to watch her in this film.
  
We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
Ta-Nehisi Coates | 2017 | Essays, History & Politics
9
9.5 (2 Ratings)
Book Rating
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.