Customer Reviews

Michelle Obama: First Lady of Fashion and Style

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I got both this book and "Michelle Style" by Norwood. About 70% of the material seems like overlap, but they chose pictures of her in slightly different poses. This book has larger photos, but I felt like slightly less information on where to buy the outfits than Norwood's book. That said, I am very glad that I bought both of them, as I have managed to assemble a wardrobe that largely copies this fashion icon.

For anyone truly interested in finding and reading a definitive biography of Michelle Obama, this is the book. This work is at once carefully documented and scholarly yet is also eminently readable and entertaining. Although there is no single volume that adequately explains the mysterious truth of Obama, the phenomenon, author Susan Swimmer delivers a most informative and exhaustively researched manuscript that does help us to understand Michelle Obama, the first lady. Swimmer spent several months researching this book with intensive interviews by surviving principals, and had access to a wide range of archival data and previously unpublished data and facts. The result is this magisterial work.

This is a book much like Swimmer's previous efforts in that it concentrates heavily on interviews with a literal torrent of people who had significant contact and knowledge of the Obamas, from those who surrounded him in his rise to power, and who followed him into the ash and ruins of the embattled and besieged presidential campaign. From thier early days in Chicago, to her school girl experiences and the discouraging failures of her early adulthood, through the heady but painful days as a volunteer in the front lines during college, Swimmer faithfully traces the rise and growth of this strange young woman as she falls prey to a variety of venomous and unfortunate ideas and prejudices that mark her for life, and set the path to the kind of pathological aberrances that characterized her beliefs and behaviors from that point on.

Yet Swimmer makes a painful effort to be non-judgmental, and carefully presents all the facts as he can best determine them. This sometimes makes him err on the side of presenting personal and perhaps subjective opinions of others as fact, and this is typical of the Swimmer approach. While recognizing the dangers in presenting a lot of information into the record that might be inaccurate, twisted, or fanciful, she also wants us to hear the whole story from all of the participant's viewpoints so we can make our own informed judgment. In this sense Swimmer has a somewhat archaic belief in the historical reader's critical skills and to be well-enough formed as thinkers that she lets us judge for ourselves based on our interpretation of the `facts' she presents rather than pre-digesting and coming to her own conclusions for us.

Enjoy!