I picked this book up primarily because I loved the author’s memoir, The House at Sugar Beach, about growing up in Liberia until political instability and terror forced her family to leave. This book, though, is a biography of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, president of Liberia from 2006 to 2018 and the first democratically elected female head of state in Africa. It’s a good biography, readable and engaging as all the best journalistic work is, and certainly informative though it lacks the humor and personal touch of Cooper’s memoir.

About the first quarter of this relatively short biography (290 pages) covers the first approximately 50 years of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s life, spending a few pages on her childhood before moving on to her marriage, higher education, subsequent divorce from her abusive husband (even though it meant no longer being able to raise most of their children), and her career as a financial bureaucrat. The second quarter focuses more on Liberia’s civil war and the years of coups and atrocities. Johnson Sirleaf was absent from Liberia for much of this time working for financial institutions abroad, but the reader needs to understand something of what was happening in the country to put her presidency in context. Finally, the last half covers her elections and presidency, though the book ends in 2015 and was published in 2017, before she actually left office.

The book is highly readable and offers a lot of explanation to readers who may not know anything about Liberia; Cooper is clearly adept at bridging two cultures. It is an admiring biography, and as far as I can tell an authorized one—Johnson Sirleaf allowed Cooper to follow her around and was interviewed for the book, though Cooper didn’t share her drafts—but Cooper also highlights areas where Johnson Sirleaf made poor or questionable choices. I wasn’t quite sure what to think about all her female supporters who stole their adult sons’ voter IDs to prevent them from voting for her clearly unqualified male opponent, for instance—interestingly to me, Liberian women seemed far more likely to vote for a candidate because of her gender than their American counterparts. But I was glad to see Cooper really dig into Johnson Sirleaf’s achievements in office: the chapter about how she managed to persuade other governments, multinational institutions and private companies to forgive Liberia’s $4.7 billion debt is fantastic and highlights a huge accomplishment that few others could possibly have achieved.

Meanwhile, other reviewers have mentioned that the book deals with some dark subject matter around Liberia’s civil war, and this is true though it isn’t the primary focus of the book. The last 35 pages mostly focus on the Ebola pandemic, which was interesting to read during another pandemic: there was a lot of initial denial around Ebola too, though once people accepted that it was real they seemed to do a good job of taking necessary precautions to wipe it out.

Ultimately, there’s a lot of good information in this book, but there’s more distance from its subject than I would have expected in a semi-authorized biography of someone who’s still alive: I didn’t get much sense of Johnson Sirleaf’s personality, what makes her tick, how the people close to her view her, etc. Maybe she didn’t want her personal life in a book, her family didn’t want to share, and Cooper decided to respect their wishes—hard to say. But while I still blew through the book in just a few days, I think I would have liked it even better with more personality. Cooper credits several people in the acknowledgments with making her ditch her “flip tone” and I wound up wishing she’d kept it. There are a few humorous bits, which were welcome.

But I’d certainly recommend this book to anyone interested in the subject, and Johnson Sirleaf is without doubt a tough and impressive woman, though (like everybody else) imperfect. Those who would like a more personal, in-depth and at times humorous story (with some overlapping subject matter) should check out the author’s memoir.

Only time will tell how to interpret events after the end of this book: Johnson Sirleaf stepped down in 2018, allowing for Liberia’s first peaceful transition of power in decades, but then the winner of that election was George Weah (the soccer player), whose vice president is Jewel Taylor (ex-wife of Charles Taylor, the war criminal). Hmm. I hope Cooper will keep on writing books about Liberia; I for one will be happy to keep reading them.

So Close to Being the Sh*t, Y'all Don't Even Know by Retta is a memoir written in essay form (seems to be the popular format these days). [A/N: If you're unfamiliar with Retta, she played the character of Donna Meagle on Parks & Recreation.]  This book is written more like a friend talking than anything else. While I was reading, I kept wishing that I'd chosen to consume this in audiobook format instead because I think it suits that medium better. (Honestly, I found this book a bit tedious and I'd like to blame it on the written formatting.) Retta covers the gamut from her childhood and what it was like being raised as an immigrant to this country (her family is from Liberia) to her career as an actress being continually put into a box by Hollywood. After reading Amy Poehler's memoir it's impossible for me not to compare the two and this in no way comes close to the awesomeness of that book. It was funny and I especially enjoyed her views on what it's like being a plus sized woman of color working as an actress in Hollywood but it didn't blow me away like Yes, Please. A solid 5/10. 

What's Up Next: El Deafo by Cece Bell

What I'm Currently Reading: Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

I loved reading this book. It’s a memoir of the author’s privileged childhood in Liberia, the early days of civil war there and her family’s flight, and her journey of building a life in another country and ultimately coming to terms with her homeland.

Helene Cooper is an award-winning journalist, and you can see that clearly in her writing, which is compelling, informative, and relatable. She builds scenes from her childhood in an almost novelistic way, and explores the dynamics of her complicated family with depth and honesty. While she was born to a Liberian dynasty (descended from the first free blacks who arrived from the U.S. to build a colony), there’s an ever-present reminder of her privilege in her best friend, a poor native Liberian girl her parents adopt to be her playmate. The divergence between the lives of these two as they grow older tells you a lot about Liberia (and the world). Cooper is also able to tell a personal, gripping story about the war, in which her family does not escape violence. And she includes a few helpful chapters detailing her family history and the early history of Liberia. While the portion of the book dealing with her life outside Liberia is much shorter, it’s still an interesting look at the family members’ relative assimilation and race relations in the U.S.

But it isn’t all heavy stuff. There’s quite a bit of humor and fun in the book, especially as the author remembers her childhood and teenage years. She also seems enthusiastic about explaining Liberian culture and Liberian English to those unfamiliar with it, adding a lot of flavor to the story.

In fact, perhaps neither of my two reservations about the book is fairly attributed to the author. One is that it has more than its share of copyediting mistakes. The other is that, despite the history included, I never understood how the relatively peaceful country in which Cooper grew up spawned one of Africa’s most brutal civil wars, with all the atrocities she describes. I’m sure that to the teenaged Helene Cooper this made just as little sense; but as a veteran foreign correspondent who rode along for the invasion of Iraq, she probably has some insight into what makes wars different from one another. I would have appreciated the level of research about the war that she clearly put into the colony’s early years, though as a memoir the book succeeds regardless.

Overall, this is a very well-told story featuring distinct, complicated personalities, from a self-aware and thoughtful writer with fascinating life experiences. It’s also a great way to learn about a corner of the world that most people know little about. I would definitely recommend this one.

As a rule I avoid books about war or calamity written from the perspective of child protagonists, in part because this viewpoint leads to oversimplification of complex events and in part because such books are almost always sentimental or precious. I chose this book, told from the perspective of a preteen boy who becomes a child soldier, both for the West African setting (it is set in Ivory Coast, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, but the largest chunk takes place in Liberia, so I'm using it as my challenge book for that country) and for the authentic, conversational, foul-mouthed and entirely unsentimental voice. This is the book’s strongest quality, one that’s even more impressive given that this is a translation (you’d never know it without being told; I’d love to be able to sample the French original and see how it compares). Here’s a taste:

“The dead child-soldier was called Kid, Captain Kid. Now and again in his beautiful song, Colonel Papa le Bon chanted ‘Captain Kid’ and the whole cortege howled after him ‘Kid, Kid’. You should have heard it. They sounded like a bunch of retards.”

“The same goes for me. I don’t have to talk, I’m not obliged to tell my dog’s-life-story, wading through dictionary after dictionary. I’m fed up talking, so I’m going to stop for today. You can all fuck off!”

The dictionaries are an odd conceit: our narrator, Birahima, uses four dictionaries to look up French and African words and explain them as he goes. Occasionally these “explanations” are in the form of sardonic jabs (“‘Humanitarian peacekeeping’ is when one country is allowed to send soldiers into another country to kill innocent victims in their own country, in their own villages, in their own huts, sitting on their own mats.”), but most of the time he’s simply defining words most readers will already know (“Every morning he went to the temple and officiated. ‘Officiate’ is a big word that means ‘to conduct a religious ceremony’, that’s what it says in my Larousse.”). 

One might wonder how Birahima comes to use these words at all if he doesn’t know them (perhaps the entire conceit is meant to highlight the way African fiction tends to explain itself to a foreign audience, by turning the tables on us), but that question pales beside the fact that well before the halfway point, Birahima virtually abandons his own story and never fully returns to it. Instead, most of the second half the book is taken up by a history lesson on the warfare in Liberia and Sierra Leone, interspersed with anecdotes about the backstories of other child soldiers and about various larger-than-life men and women who take part in the wars. Unfortunately, we don’t see Birahima interact with these other characters; the stories he tells about his friends end with their becoming child soldiers, and in a way his own does too, even though that occurs early in the book. We never do get to read about the day-to-day lives of child soldiers or how they interact with one another.

One could rationalize that a real child soldier would be reluctant to tell his story, and would talk about other things instead, and maybe that's what Kourouma was trying to accomplish, though I'm not convinced a real child soldier would give us dozens of pages of history lessons either. Regardless, I picked up this novel hoping to read a story, and got a book that started out promisingly but grew increasingly disjointed and never did tell that story. Disappointing.