At times, the recollections of the Robinson family in “Michelle Obama: A Life” read like a parenting manual for how to raise confident, high-achieving kids; it was that warmth and stability that Barack Obama, the son of a single, transient mother, craved, and it grounded him as he ascended in politics. “If Barack was a helium balloon,” Slevin writes, “Michelle was the one holding the string.” The descriptions of piano lessons and drama classes and church on Sunday and drives in the family’s Buick Electra 225 to explore wider (and whiter) Chicago make Mrs. Obama’s childhood sound like a South Side edition of “Leave It to Beaver.” Craig called it “the Shangri-La of upbringings.”

But racial tensions were never far away, and the first half of the book, which includes Mrs. Obama’s time at Princeton and Harvard Law School and as a young professional, is ripe with revelations about her deeply complicated relationship with her own position as an Ivy League-­educated black woman. Ever since her childhood, she encountered the belief that because she was well read and educated, she somehow wasn’t black enough; at the same time, the white world didn’t make her feel entirely welcome either.