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3.83 AVERAGE
3.83 AVERAGE
Very well written and heartfelt. It lingered on her childhood a little longer than I thought it would, and seemed to speed through the revolt. Overall, though, a good read.
Finding this totally fascinating. A friend of mine grew up in Liberia and went to school with this gal. Interesting to learn the history of Liberia from a woman who is a true Liberian! Not an ex-pat. Loving it so far.
Loved this book. It really makes you think. I am the mom of 3rd culture kids since I live outside my home country. Living in Africa, I can understand many things the author describes. I would not have had the perspective on this book that I have now that I live in Africa.
My hat goes off to the mom, and I would like to meet her and shake her hand and tell her she is a hero for sacrificing herself for her girls.
Listened to this audiobook and loved the author's Liberian English accent.
So much about this book I loved.
You may love this book if you:
1. Live in Africa
2. Are descended from slaves.
3. Ever felt you had issues fitting in due to 3rd culture issues.
Loved this book. It really makes you think. I am the mom of 3rd culture kids since I live outside my home country. Living in Africa, I can understand many things the author describes. I would not have had the perspective on this book that I have now that I live in Africa.
My hat goes off to the mom, and I would like to meet her and shake her hand and tell her she is a hero for sacrificing herself for her girls.
Listened to this audiobook and loved the author's Liberian English accent.
So much about this book I loved.
You may love this book if you:
1. Live in Africa
2. Are descended from slaves.
3. Ever felt you had issues fitting in due to 3rd culture issues.
Loved this book to begin with, but the narrative got a little muddled half-way through. Picked up again near the end though. Best thing about this book: I received an education on Liberia history and its people. Will definitely read more on this subject.
I had no idea about the history of Liberia. Fascinating.
I leaned a lot about Liberia and hope to read more books about this place and people's experiences. I really enjoyed this book!
This book was a little like Strength in What Remains in that the story itself was incredible, but the book didn't tell me much more than what was on the jacket. I was disappointed.
emotional
informative
reflective
medium-paced
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.5 stars. I loved Helene Cooper's biography of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Cooper's memoir provides a personal perspective on some of the same forces that shaped President Sirleaf's experiences, candidacy, and presidency. It felt as though Cooper spent much more time on the years before the Liberian civil war than those after, which is an interesting choice--a decision not to write a disaster memoir, but to document what the country was like pre-war (in part, I would imagine, because Cooper and her family left so soon after the war began).
Rogues and thieves were very different animals. Rogues broke into your house while you were sleeping and made off with the fine china. Thieves worked for the government and stole money from the public treasury.
Cooper traces her Liberian history to the nation's founding; her great-grandfathers both arrived in the 19th century on boats chartered by the American Colonial Society. Her lineage, the Johnsons and the Coopers, were among the elite who dominated government posts and high society. Like many of her round-cheeked cousins, she enjoyed a chauffeured youth, private schools, trips abroad and other markers of her privileged class status – including the 'sister for hire' her mother fostered from a local family for years to keep her company, Eunice. She mastered Liberian English, practiced a stateside accent, and dabbled in an indigenous language of people around her. She marveled at Michael Jackson, had crushes on schoolboys, and lamented her mother's beachside McMansion for its distance from Monrovia.
A national coup upset her life – her role models all became targets, so her mother took her to Tennessee. Cooper grew up to be a journalist, traveling to remote places for incredible ledes and bylines. But often thinking of the nation she had left behind.
She discusses her burgeoning understanding of apartheid via learning about South Africa. The horrors of naked class divides, the violent upsets that follow poor governance elsewhere. She skims but didn't underline enough, for my taste, that her people were on the wrong side of that line for generations. She repeatedly denounces Samuel Doe for his failed leadership but her family gets softer treatment. This has the effect of suggesting that colonialism is good, actually, for the "uncivilized population" subjected to domineering rule. Very "Yay law and order ... and we would have gotten to that other stuff." Yikes.
It's been nearly a year of the state of Isral's relentless bombardment of Gaza - an occupation and that led me to want to read more about Liberia and deeply study colonialism in the first place. This memoir, one woman's efforts to lay claim to the land her forebears declared their own is fascinating for its internal tensions and frequent holes where self-reflection should be. Maybe there's some punctuation on the page, or implied inflections in font, but as she read it, it feels like she sets up jokes and fails to realize that she's the punchline.
I'm curious (but won't go look, it will piss me off, lol) about what her contemporaries found so phenomenal when this came out to acclaim ~15 years ago.