A brisk chronicle of a strong-willed, tireless, and determined leader.
A celebratory biography of Africa’s first female president and 2011 Nobel Prize winner.
The Pulitzer Prize–winning Pentagon correspondent for the New York Times, Cooper (The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood, 2008, etc.) traces the improbable career of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (b. 1938), a woman of spectacular political achievement. Drawing heavily on Sirleaf’s autobiography and interviews with her and her supporters, Cooper creates an admiring portrait that would have benefited from some distance, wider research, and more probing examination. Sirleaf perpetuated the legend that she was destined for greatness from birth, and after graduating from high school, she looked for ways to fulfill that prophecy. When reversed family fortunes precluded her going to Europe or America “to acquire finishing,” at 17, she married a Western-educated 24-year-old who seemed “suave and sophisticated.” After the births of four sons within the next few years, she felt frustrated about her future in sexist, desperately impoverished Liberia. When her husband went to Wisconsin for graduate study, she decided to go, too, to earn a business degree. Within a decade, she had left her abusive spouse, taken a position at Liberia’s Ministry of Finance and then an assignment as a loan officer at the World Bank, where “she began to build her international contacts with the Western leaders who controlled the purse strings for developing countries.” She proved herself adept at networking in financial circles, becoming a vice president at Citibank before moving to Equator Bank. With an invaluable financial career behind her, she entered politics. Cooper details the horrifying atrocities (dismemberments, rapes, mass executions) perpetrated by ruthless tyrants, the last of whom, Charles Taylor, Sirleaf initially backed. The author also reveals the support of these regimes by a succession of American administrations. Sirleaf won the presidency in 2005, inciting a violent backlash against women, including ritualistic killings. She was re-elected in 2011 despite charges of nepotism and corruption, which Cooper allows Sirleaf to defend.
A brisk chronicle of a strong-willed, tireless, and determined leader.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4516-9735-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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