The Light We Carry by Michelle Obama

The former first lady is a charming woman whose personality comes through loud and clear in her writing. She is not the best memoir writer, but she is an engaging one, so much so that I will certainly read her next book should there be one. This is a how-to book. She learned to cope with the various ways that people belittle others and express their hatred from her parents, and the lessons are wise and generalizable. She felt like she stuck out (she was the tallest person in her class for a very long time) and that she was unliked. She gives a great example about not wanting to go to math class because her teacher didn't like her. Her mother advised that the teacher has a lot of math to teach and she had a lot of math to learn, so go to class to get math and come home to be liked. This is a practical guide to help us all learn to cope with adversity, be it prejudice, a pandemic or the chilling thought of Donald Trump re-entering the White House. In Obama’s words, the aim is to give readers a “glimpse inside my personal toolkit” – the strategies she uses to be “more comfortable, less paralyzed, inside of uncertainty”. The book contains 10 of these techniques, ranging from “starting kind” through to “the whole of us”. Miraculously, these self-help bromides don’t come across as cloying, mainly because Obama is so disarmingly honest about her fears, failures, and all-too human flaws. In the end it is a book about how to cope with the vitriol flung from the far right. I would point out that those people have to live with all that rage, and the rest of us do not. This is a way to walk away and feel good about it.