An American journey

"Becoming" is refined and forthright, gracefully written and at times laugh-out-loud funny, with a humbler tone

BECOMING

Michelle Obama

Crown Publishing Group 

426 pages 

$32.50

Back in the ancestral homeland of Michelle Obama, the architects of Jim Crow took great pains to set down the boundaries and define the roles of anyone living in the pre-modern South. Signs directed people to where they could sit, stand, get a sip of water. They reinforced the social order of an American hierarchy — how people were seen, what they were called, what they had been before the Republic was founded and what was presumed they could never be.

It was with the weight of this history in her