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.
One of Sirleaf's grandfathers was a Liberian chief, the other was a German trader. She was raised mostly in Monrovia as a light-skinned member of the Congo elite, but maintained contact with her rural relatives. She married young and had four children by age 22, before going to Wisconsin for a degree in accounting. On her return to Liberia, she became head of the Debt Service Division at the Treasury Department, a huge job for a young woman in Liberia in the 1960s. Cooper offers little insight into Sirleaf's childhood and youth--by page 19 she is already 30 years old, divorced from her abusive husband and on her way.
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. "The stage was now set for the revolution that would overturn gender politics in West Africa." But Sirleaf was also an early supporter of the war criminal Charles Taylor, who led the country into a horrifically brutal conflict while Sirleaf lived and worked safely in the U.S. She finally realized her mistake and ran against him for president in 1997. She lost, but 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. Despite corruption and resistance, she made great inroads in women's rights, anti-corruption measures, education, infrastructure and health. And she won the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize four days before she went up for re-election.
Cooper frankly describes Sirleaf's support for Taylor, her nepotism and other failings as president, while sympathetically laying out what she considers to be Sirleaf's 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
Shelf Talker: This is a sympathetic biography of Liberia's extraordinary and controversial president by a Liberian-born U.S. journalist.