Title:  This Child Will Be Great, Memoir of a Remarkable Life by Africa’s First Woman President
Author: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
Pages: 315 (without appendices)
Status: Borrowed from KTB
Read this book: period, end of sentence. 

Reflections: 

I realize, though I would consider myself largely a reader of fiction, that I have only reviewed one work of fiction so far during this project.  This is due, in part, to using my last several weeks to finish some of the books about Liberia I have been neglecting wanting to read.  Reading these books now has enabled me to reflect with immediacy on what I have learned during the last two years -- about Liberia, the foreign service, and myself.  Though I usually try to read as much as I can about a place before I get there, reading, again (or further) about that place upon the eve of departure might become a new ritual for me.  But enough about me, on to the book! 

President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s autobiography, This Child Will Be Great, Memoir of a Remarkable Life by Africa’s First Woman President, is a must read.  The book is part historical overview, part personal memoir, part political manifesto, and part reelection platform (President EJS is up for reelection in 2011).  (I, unabashedly, am stealing my previously thought from a conversation a fellow foreign service officer and I had about the book last week).  In fact, President EJS could have written four different books, but as is clearly evident from the book, she’s much too busy to contemplate four separate manuscripts!  This ambitious book is well written, gripping by turns, and, most importantly, accessible to a very wide audience. 

Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa’s first woman president, has already secured her place in history as one of the most influential and inspiring world leaders of this century.  She will be remembered amongst the ranks of fellow statesmen-scholars Nelson Mandela, Julius Nyerere, and Kofi Annan.  And rightly so.  Her book should be read by the widest possible audience and like Long Walk to Freedom should become an international bestseller.  I can see this book being used for leadership development seminars, development economics courses, or youth empowerment round-tables. 

One thing that this book underscored for me is that, at its roots, “Liberia” is flawed (as arbitrarily carved a nation state as any other African country).  Its unique historical backdrop is its biggest challenge -- the country was not spared from the legacy of colonialism, though calling freed black slaves colonizers a la the British, French, and Belgians in not entirely apropos.  Liberia’s struggle against itself is bound to continue, albeit not as violently and disastrously as before due in large part to President EJS.  My epiphany reading this book was that President EJS is the very best person for the job of President of Liberia.  Despite the continuing corruption and slow pace of postwar development, there was, and is, nobody in the (political) field as capable, devoted, and trustworthy as EJS to preside over Liberia.   (As I mentioned, the book is part campaign material.  And, good campaign material it is, look at me saying there is nobody who can compete against her!)  Truly, President EJS is Liberia’s best hope at a full recovery from the trauma of 14+ years of civil war.  I sincerely hope she wins reelection – reelection, by the way, would make her 80 at the end of her second term!  Come on, who isn’t inspired by that – can you imagine being President in your 70s?  President EJS proves in this book (as well as in action) that she is, truly, the Iron Lady of Liberia. 

Favorite Quotes: 

“Moreover, the inability to tolerate criticism is a troublesome trait in any human being, but in a leader it is especially so.  If you are a leader, you are going to get hit.  You are going to get hit verbally sometimes with some very harsh words; you must be prepared to take criticism, to stand still and let it just pass over you without resorting to retribution or revenge.  Being able to ‘take it’ is part of the price of leadership, particularly in a country that is still not fully institutionalized, a country that, having only recently emerged from militarism and conflict, is still proceeding toward a democratic path” (131). 

“Liberians have had to learn to let go of may things in the past in order to move forward.  After all, Prince Johnson, the rebel leader who killed President Doe, is now a senator.  There you go.  Strange country, some people might say” (163). 

“Why are some countries, able, despite their very real and serious problems, to press ahead along the road to reconciliation, recovery, and redevelopment while others cannot?  These are critical questions for Africa, and their answers are complex and not always clear” (200). 

“Sometimes a foreign investor will complain to me of theft from the site of some building or hotel his is constructing, and I will sympathize and try to address the situation, but I will also say to him: you must understand, for decades the people of Liberia lived in a society of dependency.  After that they endured a period of political turmoil and the introduction of violence into everything they did, as a result of which our people became accustomed to living in survival mode” (293).

“One of the most difficult challenges –one of the toughest things in Liberian culture in general—is simply creating the capacity to get things done…. When you are dealing with a population, many of whom have been bypassed by education for so long, who have been deskilled through years of war and inactivity, when you are suffering from a brain drain because most of the talent has long since fled the country, just finding the people and the wherewithal to accomplish all that you must in an enormous task” (295).

Title: Journey Without Maps
Author: Graham Greene
Pages: 242
Status: Own, but not for long! 

Read this book: if only because it’s by renowned writer Graham Greene.

Reflections:

Graham Greene is a world renowned author; he wrote Orient Express, Our Man in Havana, and The Quiet American, among others.  Even though I haven’t read said books, I think it’s safe to assume they are all better than Journey Without Maps, because Journey Without Maps is one of the most boring, sexist, and racist books I have ever read, notwithstanding the mental adjustments I made for the travelogue having been written in 1936.  I won’t argue Greene’s place among the greats in English literature, but I will have to say that if you use the word “turd” in a book (I’m not kidding – wish I had the page number), I think there is room for some healthy discussion about your place in the canon. 

I started this book shortly after arriving in Liberia, because in the Embassy community here, much is made of the fact he wrote the book while living at “The Bungalow,” one of the residences on our compound, currently inhabited by our GSO (General Services Officer) and his wife.  Two years later, I finally finished it, having picked it up and put it down at least 10 different times.  This week I was bound and determined, for the sake of my project (and because I leave Liberia this Friday), to finish it.  Despite the book only being 242 pages, I felt like it took an eternity to read – I begrudge the book for making me wait to pick up other, better books.  Graham Greene (shaking of fist). 

Graham Greene was the Anthony Bourdain of the 1930s.  He was a travel writer, traveling (pre-air travel) by land and sea to exotic locations and journaling the curiosities he found there.  I would find his trip to Freetown, Sierra Leone by sea, and subsequent trek on foot to Monrovia, Liberia impressive, if Greene’s observations in Maps weren’t so racist and sexist.  As an example of the latent sexism in the book – Greene’s female cousin also makes the journey with him.  But after a passing comment in the early pages, he never once mentions her again!  Of course, we are regaled with Greene’s discomfort, fever, and complaints, though he never mentions his cousin’s assumingly similar reactions to the treacherous landscape.  This leads me to believe that Greene was a whiner and cry baby (or, at best, an exaggerating braggart) and his female cousin (he doesn’t even mention her by name) the real, unsung hero of the book.  Greene also never misses an opportunity to talk about breasts and butts – typical.  So African women tend to be less encumbered with clothing than their Western counterparts....  Do every pair of breasts along the four week - 350 mile trek really have to be extolled as sensual and erotic?  Graham Greene (shaking of fist).

I don’t want to entirely pan one of the “greats,” so I will say that some of Greene’s observations about Liberia are interesting in their prescience.  He captures Liberian politics as they were in the 1930s and as they are, quite frankly, today.  To a certain extent, little has changed in Liberia, from the dashing (bribing) of public officials to the seediness of the Western expatriate lifestyle in Monrovia.  One of the big differences in the culture he describes, however, is the prominent place of animism in village life.  While there are still weekly stories in Liberian newspapers of sassywood (ritual killings), bush schools (where boys/girls go to become men/women), and witchcraft (I have been threatened to be killed with “African signs," or witchcraft, during my tour here) – their subjects are relegated to a status of aberrant and outdated.  The central place of the supernatural, though, in as recent a past as 1936, however, calls into question just how far animism has receded from the culture.  So, despite my heretofore vociferous complaints, there were some redeeming qualities to the book.  But, overall my impression is: if you’re looking for a book that will put you straight to sleep at night, Journey Without Maps is it.  Greene’s long passages about his fear of rats and predilection for whiskey are monotonous and soporific.  Just be careful – you may have the attendant dream of hiring Sierra Leoneans to carry you in a hammock from Freetown to Monrovia.

Favorite Quotes:

“I have begun to forget what the visitor noticed so clearly – the squalor and the unhappiness and the involuntary injustices of tired men.  But as that picture is true too, I let it stand” (preface).

“’The love of liberty brought us here,’ but one can hardly blame these first half-caste settlers when the found that the love of their own liberty was not consistent with the liberty of the native tribes.  The history of the Republic was very little different from the history of neighbouring white colonies…. Today the ‘ideals’ are still American, something a little like the American of Tammany Hall; the descendants of the slaves have taken to politics with the enthusiasm of practiced crap players” (15). 

“I only mentioned these plans which came to nothing, these routes which were not followed, because they may give some idea of the vagueness of my ideas when I landed” (44). 

“I could appreciate the need in a strange place of some point of support, of one or two things scattered round which are familiar and understandable even if they are only Sydney Horler’s novels, a gin and tonic” (48). 

“There was cruelty enough in the interior, but had we done wisely exchanging the supernatural cruelty for our own?” (218). 

“…for Liberia, whether to the diplomat or to the storekeepers, was about the deadest of all ends” (227). 

Examples from passages that drove me crazy: 

“I went away but looking back I saw a young girl dancing before Landow, dancing with the sad erotic appeal of projecting buttocks and moving belly” (89). 

“Everywhere in the north I found myself welcomed because I was a white, because they hoped all the time that a white nation would take the country over.  This attitude is unreasonable, but their minds do not move on the level of reason” (103). 

“To my relief the Bassa men proved, as usual, to be liars” (214).

dachte

1. Chiisana Koi no Uta by Mongol 800
   
2. Holding On by Alex Day
   
3. Don't say 'Lazy' by Yoko Hikasa
   
4. Just for Now by Imogen Heap (awesomest live performance ever)
   
5. Vexed and Glorious by Kenna
   
6. The Housewife's Lament by Anne Hills & Cindy Mangsen
   
7. For Fruits Basket by Ritsuko Okazaki
   
8. One in a Million by Uncle Bonsai

But the impact made me realize that the last thing I need is a new car. I need old, old things so that when they are damaged or lost, I won't have regret but know that I fully used up something that I bought.

The 'bugy' as my car is known has been through it. A hazard of being owned by me.
 

Title:  Them, Adventures With Extremists
Author: Jon Ronson
Pages: 330
Status: given to me by my friend Ben, when he was ditching books prior to his escape from Belgium.
Read this book: on your commute!

Reflections:

I had never heard of Jon Ronson before I was given Them, Adventures With Extremists, despite the fact the book is billed as an international bestseller (where have I been?).  I imagine Jon Ronson to be a British version of fellow documentary maker Michael Moore, but with less a political agenda and a better sense of humor.  How is that for an endorsement?

But really, Them is great!  It is a funny / scary look into the lives of individuals and organizations branded extremists.  In this investigative piece, Ronson interviews Omar Bakri (who once called himself Osama bin Laden’s man in the UK), Thom Robb (Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan), and David Icke (a former BBC sports presenter turned conspiracy theorist) among others – morbid mirth ensues.  (Unless mirth already implies morbidity – does it?) 

The conversations Ronson has with these “celebrities,” are uncomfortably funny.  Uncomfortable because Bakri, Robb, and Icke’s notoriety stem from the earnestness with which they extol their socially unacceptable beliefs.  Funny, for example, because Icke believes that reptiles have interbred with the human race and that George W. Bush is a lizard-human hybrid.  (I was rolling!)  Ronson’s documentation of his time with these extremists makes it difficult to pan them as utterly crazy however; he documents Bakri, Robb, Icke, et al. in their own environments, doing startlingly normal day-to-day things.  For example, Ronson chronicles both a shopping trip to Cash And Carry and a weekend fishing trip to a typically British country estate with Bakri.  A conversation Ronson has with Thom Robb sums up the tension: “I ummed and ahhed.  Was Thom [Robb] weird?  He is the leader of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.  But as a person?  Thom wanted to know whether I considered him weird as a person.  I felt that Thom, as a person, was in a transitional phase between weird and not weird” (229).  Wait, you’re thinking, the leader of the Klan is self conscious?  Ronson does portray the idiosyncrasies of some very demonized individuals, which really makes you wonder…. 

What do Bakri, Robb, Icke, et al. have in common?  The thread that ties the book together is the extremists’ belief that a small group of politicians and corporate leaders, the ultra-private Bilderberg Group, secretly rule the world.  Ronson sets out to unveil the Bilderberg group and their bizarre summer rituals in a Northern California forest.  I don’t want to spoil it for you, but I will say Ronson proves there is truth to every rumor.  I highly recommend this book – it’s well written, interesting, and, as I mentioned before, funny / scary (in my mind said “funny slash scary”).  Reading it was a great way to spend a lazy Friday night!   

Favorite Quotes: 

 “’Well,’ said Yacob [Zaki], ‘one time I wanted to release a swarm of mice into the United Nations headquarters.  Women hate mice, you know.  I thought it was a brilliantly simple idea.  One swarm of mice would have crushed the whole UN process, don’t you think?’/ ‘Women standing on chairs,’ I agreed” (21). 

“I attempted, for a moment, to judge rationally whether there was any truth to this startling claim – whether Henry Kissinger really had throughout his life adopted a fake European accent to camouflage his American one.  But I couldn’t.  My rationality had suffered a tremendous blow, and I now no longer knew what was possible and what was not” (136). 

“’The point is,’ agreed Tony, ‘if someone is unstable enough to believe that lizards run the world, God knows what they might do to us’” (172). 

“Still, it was surprising to find myself in a situation where I was toning down my Jewish character traits so as not to alienate a Ku Klux Klan leader who reminded me of Woody Allen” (180).

Title: The House at Sugar Beach, In Search of a Lost African Childhood
Author: Helene Cooper
Pages: 352
Status: Own, though I’ll probably “gift” it to one of my Liberian friends in my book club.
Read this book: if you’re interested in Liberia.

Reflections: 

The House at Sugar Beach, In Search of a Lost African Childhood is a memoir of New York Times diplomatic correspondent Helene Cooper’s childhood in Liberia.  The book is broaches some very interesting themes – the search for a lost family member, the fruition of the American dream, and the complexity of African social structures – though none in enough detail for me to avidly recommend it.  Given a journalist penned the book, I did not find it particularly well written: when turning the pen to herself, Cooper fell short of my expectations given her success in her field. 

I recognize that writing a memoir is a very difficult thing to do.  There is a fine line between vainglorious and self-effacing, between “who does s/he think she is” and “who cares?”  Cooper dances on that line in this book, and, in the end, doesn’t really “do it” for me.  I am not an unbiased critic though, having just spent the last two years of my life in Liberia, which, at turns, I have both affectionately liked and vehemently hated.  That said, I expected more from the book – something revelatory like Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier or something instructive like William Power’s Blue Clay People: Seasons on Africa’s Fragile Edge.  Instead, The House at Sugar Beach is intermittently self-importantly navel-gazing and exhaustingly unassuming.   

The book is part childhood diary and part history lesson, but the abruptness with which it switches between the two makes for a rambling read.  Cooper balances on the edge of what could have been a very moving narrative about growing up in a country ready to implode because of her own family (in part), but doesn’t take the leap … perhaps because it is just too soon in her life to write a memoir (Cooper was born in the 1970s).  While the first line of book states “this is a story about rogues,” Cooper decidedly loses what could really be a story about rogues – the story of the last 30 years in Liberia – and instead writes a story about herself (not a rogue).  The book is also not about, as the book jacket implies, finding the foster sister her family left behind, but is, again, only a story about Helene Cooper.  And, to be perfectly frank, after hearing about the frivolousness of her youth and her penchant for Harlequin romances, I really didn’t care about her reporting from Iraq at the beginning of the war in 2003.  (Now that I think about it, in fact, she mentions romance novels more than she does rogues in the book.)   

Despite this, I did learn from the book, as you inevitably do when you read.  The book has a decent chronology of the Liberian civil war and its origins; it also accurately depicts “Liberian English,” with its colorful, and sometimes antiquated expressions.  Additionally, since there is a dearth of reading material about/from Liberia (as I learned when I bought every book that came up in my amazon.com search of Liberia before I came in 2007), it is a nice edition to the unfortunately slim body of writing about/from the country.   

Interesting Quotes:

I didn’t have any favorite quotes from the book per se.  However, there were are couple things described that struck me as interesting, given my time in Liberia.  The first was the description of Hotel Africa, which I recently visited with two friends and some officers from the Pakistani peacekeeping contingent of the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL). 

“The Hotel Africa opened up, with its disco and dance hall, Bacardi’s, and its outdoor cabanas and villas.  It was the talk of the town: Liberians had a new place to party.  Hotel Africa soon became the spot for wedding receptions and cool seventies themed parties.  All the disco dances from the States made their way to Bacardi’s, from the Bus Stop to the Robot to the Hustle” (138).

Hotel Africa is now merely a shell, overgrown with grass, trees, and mold and overrun with rabid dogs.  I'm including a picture below to show you as an example of how badly Hotel Africa, and by extension Liberia, fared during 14+ years of the civil war and accompanying chaos.  Photo courtesy of my friend KTB.

The second quote that struck me deals with a situation I encounter almost every day adjudicating both nonimmigrant and immigrant visas in Liberia: the complicated immigration history of Liberians to the United States.

“They said it was too dangerous, and reminded me that I was still technically in the United States illegally, on a visitor’s visa.  If I left the country, they said, I wouldn’t be able to come back” (257).

You have a duty to perform.
Do anything else,
do any number of things,
occupy your time fully,
and yet,
if you do not do this task,
all your time will have been wasted.