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pagesofpins's review against another edition
3.0
Meticulously researched, but dry in places. It definitely gave me a working understanding of the U.S.'s connection to/history with Liberia, and how daunting a task it was for Sirleaf to become president of a country where 70 percent of women have experienced gang rape, coups and mass killings control the population, racial inequality is rampant, leadership has been determined by who kills who, and an Ebola pandemic is on the horizon. She deserves that Nobel peace price and then some.
shannanh's review against another edition
4.0
A story about the first woman to become president in LIberia
geolatin's review against another edition
4.0
This story was incredibly inspiring, showing how women can prevail despite the most daunting odds and tragedies. I appreciated how Madame President wasn’t presented as perfect, showing bad decisions and some questionable practices, yet being able to learn and adapt. Women are able to take control of their own destiny and lead a country out of darkness when the men can’t get past self-interest and power grabbing.
qbit99's review against another edition
4.0
I heard about the first female president on the African continent but knew nothing about her story, her struggle, what made her such an iconic figure. This book answered pretty answered everything and when i finished it my sense of respect for this woman and all the women of Liberia is further increased.
I'm from the Congo myself and the kind of hellish environment portrayed in this book is sadly still part of the daily life of women in the eastern part of my country. It breaks my heart everyday knowing about it. Men have been failing for decades and are STILL failing those poor women, maybe it's time a woman takes the rain of that country too
I'm from the Congo myself and the kind of hellish environment portrayed in this book is sadly still part of the daily life of women in the eastern part of my country. It breaks my heart everyday knowing about it. Men have been failing for decades and are STILL failing those poor women, maybe it's time a woman takes the rain of that country too
sujata's review against another edition
4.0
This was excellent. And wonderful and tough to read after the 2016 US presidential election so many different reasons.
rallidaerule's review
5.0
The power of Liberians, and of women
Engaging informative, I learned so much about liberia, Ellen and how international aid happens on top of the power of women
Engaging informative, I learned so much about liberia, Ellen and how international aid happens on top of the power of women
isering's review against another edition
3.0
I wanted to love this book but the author was just so... American about it. "In the Fed Hall. Talk about making a statement." "He danced. George Bush danced." "Liberian women's gorgeous hues..." I understand she's making it conversational but it lost something for me. Very interesting regardless.
yyc_heather's review against another edition
4.0
One of the items in the BookRiot Read Harder challenge is a biography of a non Western world leader. I wanted to read about a woman, and this book was fascinating, inspiring and at times great wrenching. I knew very little about Liberia prior to reading, and the author does a great job of covering recent history. Some details of atrocities were hard to read. The final chapter, which dealt with Liberia's Ebola crisis, was especially poignant and had so many parallels to our collective successes and failures with COVID.
regferk's review against another edition
4.0
I read this for task #18 of the Read Harder 2021 reading challenge.
emiged's review against another edition
4.0
I had the opportunity to hear Ellen Johnson Sirleaf speak in 2015 and was deeply impressed by her history, her presence, her decisiveness, her courage, her persistence. This book has only increased my admiration for her as a person, as a politician, and as a bureaucrat.
Trigger warning: violence, rape
**********
"In Liberia a woman's place is in the market, selling oranges and potato greens and kola nuts. It is in the hot outdoor kitchen, sweating as she bends over a mortar to pound fermented cassava for fufu. It is in the field, baby strapped to her back as she hacks at the sugarcane stalks that will fetch the money that will pay for this semester's school fees for her children. And it is on her back in the dirt as one, two three, four drunk soldiers rape her in front of her crying children.
"It is in her lover's bedroom, sitting on the mattress, shivering in the air-conditioning and trying to block out the image of her colleagues who were executed by firing squad on the beach days before. It is in the cabinet room of the Executive Mansion as she tries to stem the nausea that rises when she sees those same executioners discussing the budget she put together as they look for loopholes from which they can extract money.
"In Liberia a woman's place is not in a jail cell.
"There are many things Liberian women will tolerate. They accept that it is their burden to shoulder all of the responsibility for keeping their family fed, whether that means farming alone all day or submitting to gang rape as the price that must be paid to keep their children alive. But jail, for some reason, is a step too far.
"Before Dr. Samuel Doe threw Ellen Johnson Sirleaf into a jail cell at the Barclay Training Center, she was, to the developing world, just one of many promising, ambitious West African government bureaucrats. But Doe changed all that when he locked her in the post stockade and charged her with sedition. He turned her from a bureaucrat into a global hero." (71)
**********
"Ellen argued in favor of violence. She invoked Malcolm X; his refusal to embrace nonviolence had scared white America into listening to Martin Luther King Jr. Her argument came with the powerful backing of her cult hero status. She had been imprisoned by Doe, had been sentenced to Bella Yalla, had won and then refused to take a Senate seat because the elections were fraudulent. People paid attention when Ellen Johnson Sirleaf talked." (99)
**********
"On December 24, 1989, Charles Taylor and 170 insurgents crossed the Ivorian border into Liberia, launching Liberia's civil war. It would last fourteen years and snuff out 200,000 lives.
"The ramifications of that war still aren't fully known. Who can say, three decades later, what lives would have been led by the children who were turned into soldiers at the age of eight, drugged up on amphetamines and marched into the bush on orders to kill, maim, and dismember? Who can know what demons haunt the dreams of the former child combatant, teddy bear backpack strapped over this shoulders, who sprayed a village just outside Monrovia with his machine gun while the severed head of his boyhood friend lay on the asphalt beside him, broiling under the hot sun? Or the woman who fought and screamed while her two boys were taken away by drunken rebels clad in Halloween masks, who then threw her to the ground, mounted and raped her, all the while keeping their Halloween masks on?
"Almost three decades after the start of the Civil War, Liberia is still a country of the walking wounded, one of those places where every single person of a certain age has a war story to tell, a story so grisly that your stomach turns and you want to vomit. How do people come back from that?
"But if the ramifications still aren't known, they certainly weren't foreseen back in 1989, when Taylor's forces attacked a frontier post at Butuo near the Nimba Country crossing point. Back then, all anyone knew was that someone with a legitimate chance of defeating Doe was on the march." (99-100)
**********
"Throughout all of these blood-soaked years of horror, it was the women of those countries who suffered the most. There are, after all, far worse things that dying. Dying is easy: the clap-clap of a machine gun, the slicing of a cutlass, the nothingness that comes after. Living can be harder. To live with the image of your children being dragged away, knowing they will become killers and will then be killed themselves. To be raped so often by teenagers wearing Halloween masks that you can't close your eyes without imagining a bewigged monstrosity looming above you. And to see your rapist take off his mask and reveal his face--and that face is your son's.
"In Liberia, the war turned every woman into a market woman. Rich and poor. elites and native women, educated and illiterate, the overwhelming reaction of the Liberian women to all that was going on around them was to make market. Whatever functional economy existed in Liberia during those black years existed because of the market women." (132)
**********
"There was never any question that the election of the first woman to rule Liberia would spark a backlash among the men. Africa has always been a deeply paternalistic place, dominated for centuries by a Y chromosome that instilled in generations of men the belief that no matter how many conquerors, European or otherwise, might come to rule them, at the end of the day the men would always at least have women under them. And as long as the women were under their control, many African men believed, all was not lost.
"Now Madame and her women had upended that fundamental tenet of African sexual politics. And that sparked the anger that comes from seeing someone you view as your inferior rise above you. For an American reference, just talk to some of those people holding the 'We want our country back' signs after Obama was elected president.
"With a woman president, a feat engineered largely by women, the doormats that for centuries had cushioned the men from the floor were gone. And the men wanted them back.
"But the doormats weren't willing to be doormats anymore." (200-201)
**********
"Then, as the rains peaked in July, Ebola made it known that it was not going to be silenced. How did it do this? It infected white people.
"Suddenly, this was no longer a West African problem. With the infection of two white missionaries, Kent Brantley and Nancy Writebol, who would be quickly evacuated to Atlanta, where they survived, Ebola suddenly became the subject of global hyperventilation and panic." (265)
**********
"George W. Bush had 9/11; Barack Obama, the global economic collapse. Most presidents face a single epic challenge. For Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, every year presented a new epic challenge. War had destroyed her country, taking not only 200,000 lives but blowing apart the rules that governed society, from respect for old people to protection of women and children. Children were empowered to take up guns and drugs and to turn on each other.
"Rebuilding was a consuming task, hobbled by what seemed to be a different challenge every year, from the herculean effort to put her tattered country back together after fourteen years of carnage to giving voice to the Liberian women who have, for decades, carried the country on their backs. In fact, those were easy by comparison.
"After she finished all of those, it turned out that the fates had one more, far more difficult challenge left for her: the challenge of Ebola. It was almost as if she were receiving one last directive from the omnipotent chroniclers in the sky: if you care as much as you profess to about leaving a legacy of economic growth and empowerment for women and children after you leave office, then we have one more little hurdle for you to jump.
"And it's a hurdle you'd better clear. Because if you trip, it will wipe out everything." (265-266)
**********
"By early October, unbeknownst to the global health authorities who were still putting out increasingly dire forecasts of how many people were going to die of Ebola, Liberians, led by their president, had begun a grassroots effort to climb their way out of the Ebola pit themselves.
"The debacle of the West Point quarantine, which had led to the death of Shakie Kamara and the lowest point of Madame's presidency, had been a turning point. She had called in the cavalry in the form of the U.S. military, which was busily constructing Ebola treatment units around the country, and had appealed to the United States and the international community for money, doctors, and health professionals.
"But at the same time, Madame and her people--in particular, her grassroots base--had rolled up their sleeves and taken on the fight against Ebola themselves.
"This was a country that had lived with demons for two decades, through the Doe and Taylor years. Liberians had become accustomed to learning how to live with devils. EVD, the acronym some Liberians were using (for Ebola virus disease), was just the latest in a long list of them. And if there was one thing Liberians had learned in their two decades of hell, it was that they were adaptable.
"By late September, single-family huts in local villages had chlorinated water stations outside the front entryway, and every day Liberians washed their hands with bleach so many times they joked about turning into white people. Volunteer watchdog groups--often led by the same women who helped get Madame elected in 2005 and reelected in 2011--popped up in local neighborhoods, monitoring to make sure people were washing with chlorine, taking their temperature, and, above all, not touching each other.
"They set up hand-washing stations all over town. They kept records of who had gotten sick and who had died. They put entire households under quarantine. And they made their own protective gear, using plastic shopping bags to cover their arms and flimsy paper masks to cover their mouth, so that they could take care of their sick...
"As the international community galvanized to help, Liberians were abandoning their age-old 'God will provide' adage and trying to help themselves." (278-280)
Trigger warning: violence, rape
**********
"In Liberia a woman's place is in the market, selling oranges and potato greens and kola nuts. It is in the hot outdoor kitchen, sweating as she bends over a mortar to pound fermented cassava for fufu. It is in the field, baby strapped to her back as she hacks at the sugarcane stalks that will fetch the money that will pay for this semester's school fees for her children. And it is on her back in the dirt as one, two three, four drunk soldiers rape her in front of her crying children.
"It is in her lover's bedroom, sitting on the mattress, shivering in the air-conditioning and trying to block out the image of her colleagues who were executed by firing squad on the beach days before. It is in the cabinet room of the Executive Mansion as she tries to stem the nausea that rises when she sees those same executioners discussing the budget she put together as they look for loopholes from which they can extract money.
"In Liberia a woman's place is not in a jail cell.
"There are many things Liberian women will tolerate. They accept that it is their burden to shoulder all of the responsibility for keeping their family fed, whether that means farming alone all day or submitting to gang rape as the price that must be paid to keep their children alive. But jail, for some reason, is a step too far.
"Before Dr. Samuel Doe threw Ellen Johnson Sirleaf into a jail cell at the Barclay Training Center, she was, to the developing world, just one of many promising, ambitious West African government bureaucrats. But Doe changed all that when he locked her in the post stockade and charged her with sedition. He turned her from a bureaucrat into a global hero." (71)
**********
"Ellen argued in favor of violence. She invoked Malcolm X; his refusal to embrace nonviolence had scared white America into listening to Martin Luther King Jr. Her argument came with the powerful backing of her cult hero status. She had been imprisoned by Doe, had been sentenced to Bella Yalla, had won and then refused to take a Senate seat because the elections were fraudulent. People paid attention when Ellen Johnson Sirleaf talked." (99)
**********
"On December 24, 1989, Charles Taylor and 170 insurgents crossed the Ivorian border into Liberia, launching Liberia's civil war. It would last fourteen years and snuff out 200,000 lives.
"The ramifications of that war still aren't fully known. Who can say, three decades later, what lives would have been led by the children who were turned into soldiers at the age of eight, drugged up on amphetamines and marched into the bush on orders to kill, maim, and dismember? Who can know what demons haunt the dreams of the former child combatant, teddy bear backpack strapped over this shoulders, who sprayed a village just outside Monrovia with his machine gun while the severed head of his boyhood friend lay on the asphalt beside him, broiling under the hot sun? Or the woman who fought and screamed while her two boys were taken away by drunken rebels clad in Halloween masks, who then threw her to the ground, mounted and raped her, all the while keeping their Halloween masks on?
"Almost three decades after the start of the Civil War, Liberia is still a country of the walking wounded, one of those places where every single person of a certain age has a war story to tell, a story so grisly that your stomach turns and you want to vomit. How do people come back from that?
"But if the ramifications still aren't known, they certainly weren't foreseen back in 1989, when Taylor's forces attacked a frontier post at Butuo near the Nimba Country crossing point. Back then, all anyone knew was that someone with a legitimate chance of defeating Doe was on the march." (99-100)
**********
"Throughout all of these blood-soaked years of horror, it was the women of those countries who suffered the most. There are, after all, far worse things that dying. Dying is easy: the clap-clap of a machine gun, the slicing of a cutlass, the nothingness that comes after. Living can be harder. To live with the image of your children being dragged away, knowing they will become killers and will then be killed themselves. To be raped so often by teenagers wearing Halloween masks that you can't close your eyes without imagining a bewigged monstrosity looming above you. And to see your rapist take off his mask and reveal his face--and that face is your son's.
"In Liberia, the war turned every woman into a market woman. Rich and poor. elites and native women, educated and illiterate, the overwhelming reaction of the Liberian women to all that was going on around them was to make market. Whatever functional economy existed in Liberia during those black years existed because of the market women." (132)
**********
"There was never any question that the election of the first woman to rule Liberia would spark a backlash among the men. Africa has always been a deeply paternalistic place, dominated for centuries by a Y chromosome that instilled in generations of men the belief that no matter how many conquerors, European or otherwise, might come to rule them, at the end of the day the men would always at least have women under them. And as long as the women were under their control, many African men believed, all was not lost.
"Now Madame and her women had upended that fundamental tenet of African sexual politics. And that sparked the anger that comes from seeing someone you view as your inferior rise above you. For an American reference, just talk to some of those people holding the 'We want our country back' signs after Obama was elected president.
"With a woman president, a feat engineered largely by women, the doormats that for centuries had cushioned the men from the floor were gone. And the men wanted them back.
"But the doormats weren't willing to be doormats anymore." (200-201)
**********
"Then, as the rains peaked in July, Ebola made it known that it was not going to be silenced. How did it do this? It infected white people.
"Suddenly, this was no longer a West African problem. With the infection of two white missionaries, Kent Brantley and Nancy Writebol, who would be quickly evacuated to Atlanta, where they survived, Ebola suddenly became the subject of global hyperventilation and panic." (265)
**********
"George W. Bush had 9/11; Barack Obama, the global economic collapse. Most presidents face a single epic challenge. For Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, every year presented a new epic challenge. War had destroyed her country, taking not only 200,000 lives but blowing apart the rules that governed society, from respect for old people to protection of women and children. Children were empowered to take up guns and drugs and to turn on each other.
"Rebuilding was a consuming task, hobbled by what seemed to be a different challenge every year, from the herculean effort to put her tattered country back together after fourteen years of carnage to giving voice to the Liberian women who have, for decades, carried the country on their backs. In fact, those were easy by comparison.
"After she finished all of those, it turned out that the fates had one more, far more difficult challenge left for her: the challenge of Ebola. It was almost as if she were receiving one last directive from the omnipotent chroniclers in the sky: if you care as much as you profess to about leaving a legacy of economic growth and empowerment for women and children after you leave office, then we have one more little hurdle for you to jump.
"And it's a hurdle you'd better clear. Because if you trip, it will wipe out everything." (265-266)
**********
"By early October, unbeknownst to the global health authorities who were still putting out increasingly dire forecasts of how many people were going to die of Ebola, Liberians, led by their president, had begun a grassroots effort to climb their way out of the Ebola pit themselves.
"The debacle of the West Point quarantine, which had led to the death of Shakie Kamara and the lowest point of Madame's presidency, had been a turning point. She had called in the cavalry in the form of the U.S. military, which was busily constructing Ebola treatment units around the country, and had appealed to the United States and the international community for money, doctors, and health professionals.
"But at the same time, Madame and her people--in particular, her grassroots base--had rolled up their sleeves and taken on the fight against Ebola themselves.
"This was a country that had lived with demons for two decades, through the Doe and Taylor years. Liberians had become accustomed to learning how to live with devils. EVD, the acronym some Liberians were using (for Ebola virus disease), was just the latest in a long list of them. And if there was one thing Liberians had learned in their two decades of hell, it was that they were adaptable.
"By late September, single-family huts in local villages had chlorinated water stations outside the front entryway, and every day Liberians washed their hands with bleach so many times they joked about turning into white people. Volunteer watchdog groups--often led by the same women who helped get Madame elected in 2005 and reelected in 2011--popped up in local neighborhoods, monitoring to make sure people were washing with chlorine, taking their temperature, and, above all, not touching each other.
"They set up hand-washing stations all over town. They kept records of who had gotten sick and who had died. They put entire households under quarantine. And they made their own protective gear, using plastic shopping bags to cover their arms and flimsy paper masks to cover their mouth, so that they could take care of their sick...
"As the international community galvanized to help, Liberians were abandoning their age-old 'God will provide' adage and trying to help themselves." (278-280)