Helene Cooper (The House at Sugar Beach) is a Liberian-born, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has worked for the White House, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Her second book, Madame President, is a sympathetic biography of Liberia's extraordinary and controversial president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.
Raised mostly in Monrovia as a light-skinned member of the Congo elite, Sirleaf became head of the Debt Service Division at the Treasury Department in the 1960s, a huge job for a young woman in Liberia at the time. Her courage was astonishing from the start of her career. She repeatedly spoke out against Liberian political corruption despite being marginalized at work, jailed and sentenced to hard labor, released and imprisoned again, gradually becoming a domestic and international political hero. She first ran for president in 1997, but lost. She ran again in 2005, with a spectacularly successful grassroots campaign that increased the voter registration of Liberian women from 15% to 51%. Sirleaf then had to confront the chaos of her decimated, traumatized and deeply violent country, its $4.7 billion debt and the outbreak of Ebola. She won the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize four days before she went up for re-election.
Cooper frankly describes Sirleaf's missteps, nepotism and other failings as president, while sympathetically laying out what she considers to be extenuating circumstances. She regards Sirleaf as a flawed but still heroic figure, and though her view is persuasive, she also makes it possible for readers to develop their own opinions. Madame President is a valuable addition to the history of an iconic world leader. --Sara Catterall