With comedy grotesque timing, Michelle Obama’s self-help book Overcoming: A Workbook (Viking) comes out in hardback on 3 December, timed for three weeks before Christmas, presumably, and not as a postscript to November’s Democrat catastrophe. Leaving aside the observation that the former first lady’s publication seems to be little more than a mishmash of pleasant, banal platitudes, I was struck by the number of blank “activity” pages for purchasers to write their own “fortifying” thoughts. I’m sorry to say that a gallows humour laugh was triggered by her instruction to “write about a time someone tried to diminish you?”. Hard not to read that without the image of the insult-spewing orange oaf coming to mind.
December is always a patchy, quiet month for new books (publishers are focused on their new year schedules) but one stocking-filler treat is Gerald Durrell’s Myself & Other Animals (Viking), a posthumous work of autobiographical writing, released on 5 December to mark the naturalist’s centenary on 7 January 2025. Durrell was a pioneering conservationist and his words resonate as loudly as ever, especially: “When man continues to destroy nature, he saws off the very branch on which he sits.”
