Excerpt
SUMMARY: In “Michelle Obama: A Life,” veteran political journalist Peter Slevin tackles a different side of politics by examining how the first lady’s life story influenced her priorities in the White House. Gwen Ifill sits down with the author to discuss what he discovered.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): Now, to the latest addition on the NewsHour Bookshelf.
It’s a new biography of the first lady, “Michelle Obama: A Life” by Peter Slevin, a veteran political reporter formerly with The Washington Post.
Recently, he sat down with Gwen Ifill at Busboys and Poets, a restaurant and bookstore chain in the Washington, D.C., area.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): Peter Slevin, thank you for joining us.
PETER SLEVIN, Author, “Michelle Obama: A Life”: It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks.
GWEN IFILL: In this book, you say that at one point Michelle Obama described herself as a statistical anomaly.
As you were putting together this history, the story of her life, what did you find out?
PETER SLEVIN: What I found was that Michelle Obama came from a working-class family on the South Side of Chicago. She lived in a small apartment. Her parents had not gone to college. And the odds were kind of stacked against her.
And then she managed to find her way to a magnet school, to Princeton, to Harvard, and to a position of some influence in the country.
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