This was really interesting and enjoyable. I was a little hesitant to read it so soon after Sonia Sotomayor's My Beloved World, because although I knew very little about Michelle Obama, somewhere in the dim recesses of my brain I'd grasped she'd been a lawyer, and I wanted a break before another law-heavy book because I do find them a little hard going (though I did enjoy the Sotomayor book, don't get me wrong). Luckily for me, the whole law experience is zipped through very quickly here. Law school merits, if I recall correctly, an entire paragraph, and Obama's early experiences in law bored her rigid, a fact with which I could utterly sympathise. So it's not very long at all until we get to politics, which I find much more visceral and appealing.

Though really, I think it's fair to say that the book is political from the beginning. There's an awareness of inequality, of urban change and the ability of individuals to access (or not access) educational and social advantages that permeates the text. Throughout the book, Obama comments that she has "never been a fan of politics," that she does not have a political mind, and that's not a politician herself. I can maybe agree with the last, in that she's never been elected to political office, but is that what makes a politician? Increasingly, I wonder if limiting that definition does us any favours, because it seems to me that Obama is intensely political, and has been nearly all the way through her working life. Before her stint in the White House, her own work is strongly centred around increasing access for minorities and marginalised people, both to healthcare and to political and power structures of various sorts. She has an interest and a talent for it, and I fail to see how this isn't a fundamentally political job, so I think she under-rates herself there. In the White House, of course, one cannot escape politics, but it was interesting to have the experience of the institution from the point of view of the First Lady, because I cannot imagine - even knowing very little about American First Ladies as I do - that that could ever be an easy job. The lack of privacy alone... it's expected, of course, but I'd find it nigh on unbearable, I don't know how any of them cope. Anyway, it's approachable and sympathetic and well worth reading.