IOP - "Michelle Obama: A Life"

Join the Institute of Politics to hear from Peter Slevin, the author of the first comprehensive account of the life and times of Michelle Obama, a woman of achievement and purpose—and the most unlikely first lady in modern American history. With disciplined reporting and a storyteller’s eye for revealing detail, Mr. Slevin follows Michelle to the White House from her working-class childhood on Chicago’s largely segregated South Side.

The journey winds from the intricacies of her upbringing as the highly focused daughter of a gregarious city water-plant worker afflicted with multiple sclerosis to the tribulations she faces at Princeton University and Harvard Law School during the racially charged 1980s. And then returning to Chicago, where she works in an elite law firm and meets a law student from Hawaii named Barack Obama. Unsatisfied by corporate law, Michelle embarks on a search for meaningful work that takes her back to the community of her South Side youth, even as she struggles to find balance as a mother and a professional—while married to a man who wants to be president. Before reaching the White House, she spends a dozen years at the University of Chicago, concentrating on the university's historically uneasy relationship with surrounding communities. Mr. Slevin offers new details about that relationship, the university's efforts, and Michelle's role in trying to shift age-old patterns.

Former IOP fellow, Chicago Sun-Times columnist, and ABC7 political analyst Laura Washington will moderate this discussion.

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