Courage is Contagious: And Other Reasons to Be Grateful for Michelle Obama

This brief book collects laudatory essays about former first lady Michelle Obama. The 19 selections, contributed by novelists, activists, performers, and others, extol their subject as an embodiment of authentic dignity and self-respect and as a role model for everyone. Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie beautifully expresses the mingled pride and anxiety that the first lady stimulated in her and also how Adichie often “felt protective” of the first lady “because she was speaking to an America often too quick to read a black woman’s confidence as arrogance, her straightforwardness as entitlement.” Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood writes of a first lady “who lives and breathes our values every day.” There are two eighth-grade students among the contributors, both of whom see Michelle Obama as an example for overcoming adversity and of the message that, as actress Rashida Jones puts it, “It’s okay to be everything,” by which she means a complex, engaged, multifaceted woman. Editor Haramis writes of photographing the former first lady in the introduction, and Lena Dunham, cofounder of the Lenny imprint, will please fans with her foreword. Agent: David Kuhn, Kuhn Projects. (Oct.)