This biography of President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf explores the life and times of Africa's first elected female head of state. The descendant of Indigenous Liberians and a German trader, Sirleaf was raised in the privileged milieu of the Americo-Liberian elite. She pursued advanced education and challenging employment that defied prescribed gender roles, holding high-level public and private sector positions while enduring separation from her children and abuse from her spouse. Based on Sirleaf's memoir, interviews with Sirleaf and her female supporters, press reports, and secondary sources, the book explores the horrors of Liberia's civil war and the female-led mobilization that resulted in electoral victory. Although Sirleaf's flaws are mentioned, the book is largely laudatory. Journalist Cooper downplays Sirleaf's involvement with regimes that engaged in human rights abuses, the damage done to marginalized populations by her allies in the international financial community, and the corrupt practices of many associates. The book does not examine class-based fractures in female solidarity. Cooper criticizes but does not explain the actions of market women who promoted Sirleaf's candidacy but withdrew their support when her policies forcibly removed them from desirable areas and bulldozed their "illegal" stalls. This book is important. A more critical eye would have rendered it even more significant. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries.

--E. S. Schmidt, Loyola University Maryland

Elizabeth S. Schmidt

Loyola University Maryland

In this biography of Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (b. 1938), Cooper (The House at Sugar Beach) does more than document the historic rise of Liberia's first female leader. She presents a harrowing account of the Liberian civil war; the countless deaths, rapes, and abuses suffered by the people of Liberia; and the trauma experienced by children forced to take up arms, by women forced to watch their loved ones die in the most brutal fashion. It is a story of power and defiance but also of poverty, loss, and the terrible cost of war. Cooper details the lives of Liberia's market women, who watched their children perish, who answered Sirleaf's call to "vote for woman," and who fell victim to Ebola. From start to finish, Cooper presents an eye-opening account, holding nothing back. Slipping in and out of Liberian English, she creates a vivid portrait of life in Liberia, illustrating the odds and struggles Sirleaf faced. VERDICT Powerful and thoroughly researched, Cooper's narratives are haunting and cinematic in their level of detail. Recommended for readers who enjoy biographies of world leaders and African history. [See Prepub Alert, 10/3/16.]—Gricel Dominguez, Florida International Univ. Lib.

Cooper, a Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times journalist, shares a riveting tale of civil war, political corruption, and personal ambition. Like her memoir, The House at Sugar Beach, this biography delves into Liberia's modern-day travails. Its heroes are women—not only Sirleaf, the first democratically elected female president of Liberia (and its current president), who earned a Nobel Peace Prize and handled the 2014 Ebola crisis, but the ordinary market women who threw their influence behind her. In 1938, Sirleaf was born into a Liberia divided by ethnic rivalries. Though Sirleaf hailed from a family of indigenous Liberians, she physically resembled the elite Congo people, descendants of American migrants. This provided her "the gift of camouflage" and eased her movement among different groups. Hardworking and well educated, Sirleaf carved out a career in finance, her entrée into government and politics. Sirleaf narrowly survived Samuel Doe's 1980 military coup, and she lived in exile for most of Charles Taylor's corrupt and bloody rule. She unsuccessfully challenged him for the presidency in 1997, but backed by a cross-section of women, she won in 2005. Cooper writes from the perspective of an affectionate native daughter, and though clear-eyed about Liberia's problems, she offers little criticism of Sirleaf, leaving that delicate issue to future historians. Agent: Dorian Karchmar, WME. (Mar.)