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Mild Michelle Obama 

Michelle By Liza Mundy (Simon & Schuster, $25) 

It's unfortunate that Michelle is such a dull book. The story of a working-class black girl from the south side of Chicago,

now on the cusp of becoming America's First Lady, must

surely hold nuggets of dramatic tension, but you won't find

them here.

Reading this book made me long for a writer like Curtis

Sittenfeld, the novelist who imagined Laura Bush to life in

  American Wife, or an observer with the intimate access of 

Yasmina Reza, the French playwright who spent a year with

France's now-president, Nicolas Sarkozy, before penning her

book about him.

It's not that author Liza Mundy hasn't labored responsibly.

Denied access to the Obamas for the purposes of this book (she had interviewed them in

2007 as a reporter for the Washington Post ), she pounded the pavement, often literally,

and turned up friends, family, teachers and colleagues willing to go on the record.

But the lack of up-close access, combined with a ploddingly chronological structure and

bouts of repetition, has resulted in a book that commits the cardinal journalistic sin of 

telling rather than showing. Not until page 172 did I get a sense of the warm, funny

Michelle I kept reading about, and that came from an interview Michelle did with 60

 Minutes just after her husband announced his run. Michelle said Barack had promised toquit smoking, and the interviewer noted that lots of Americans would now be watching

him. She replied, "Absolutely, please, America, watch ... keep an eye on him, and call me

if you see him smoking."

But much of the book is filled with banal observations and shallow quotes. We are told

that young Michelle was "pretty down-to-earth," "smart" and "extremely nice," and that

her mother is "salt of the earth." Michelle was very upset by her father's death, and

Barack was very excited when his first child was born, the reader is told.

Narrative shortcomings notwithstanding,  Michelle deserves to be considered on more

than its literary merits. Michelle Obama has been thrust, after all, into a history-makingrole, and  Michelle is our first book-length compendium of facts about her. (Another

Michelle Obama biography is due to be released in November.)

 MichelleThat is a snooze is probably a good thing for the Obama campaign. After all,

one doesn't want too interesting a first lady. Dogged attempts to find controversy in Mrs.

Obama have been a little strained all along, and this book makes them look more so.

After 200 pages of mundane detail about college, law school, Chicago philanthropies and

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child rearing, critics like Mark Steyn--who called her "Kim Jong-Il dressed up with a bit of 

Oprah Winfrey dressing"--sound downright unhinged. (Though after this book, he, too,

might come to see her as benign.)

The author seems to have searched for negatives, but the best she could come up with are

these points: Michelle can be stern and pushy. She once pestered a high school typingteacher into giving her a better grade. She was apparently somewhat dissatisfied with her

first job as a corporate lawyer. And Michelle--who left corporate law to work for non-

profits--implicitly insulted former colleagues by suggesting that corporate lawyers might

be unhappy.

This is hardly the stuff of scandal. What about the presidential campaign's more difficult

Michelle moments? As has been widely reported, her college thesis dwelled on race.

(God forbid we should all have our characters' judged on college essays.) In it, she

wondered whether, with her top-notch education, she would end up moving farther and

farther away from the black community in which she grew up, and she makes a sort of 

promise to herself to help that community: "This realization has presently made my goalsto actively utilize my resources to benefit the Black community more desirable," she

wrote in her best college-student-ese.

The thesis led some critics to accuse her of wanting to foment racial separatism. But that

says more about the critics, and the more absurd reaches of American racial politics, than

it does about Mrs. Obama. Michelle has also, in many speeches and interviews, observed

that ongoing racial prejudice exists in America, which has elicited criticism and

contributed to accusations that she has a "grievance." (She was called "Mrs. Grievance"

on the cover of  National Review.)

It's not clear what sort of attitude her critics would have preferred. Maybe someone whohad never noticed race? That would be bizarre, given her background. Michelle grew up

at that heady time when real opportunity was opening up for blacks, but racism continued

to confuse the message: Her family was able to move to a South Side neighborhood with

genuinely better schools and services than the one they left behind--but watched as the

white population fled.

Michelle gained admittance to a multi-ethnic public magnet school, which spring-

boarded her into Princeton--where a roommate's mother reacted with horror on learning

that her daughter had been assigned to bunk with a black girl. Especially in the uncertain

years of early adulthood, Michelle comes across as someone who looked around a little

warily--or maybe nervously--even as she made academic and professional strides.

It is in giving this background and context to the Michelle Obama we see in the limelight

that Mundy performs the book's greatest service. Indeed, in the acknowledgments,

Mundy thanks her sources for having performed a "public service." Taken in that light,

 Michelle is not bad. Journalism is supposed to be the first draft of history, and as a first

draft, the book does its job.