Dr ellen johnson sirleaf biography book

Madame President: The Fantastic Journey of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf,
 by Helene Cooper. Simon & Schuster, pages. $

“Madame President: Magnanimity Extraordinary Journey of Ellen Author Sirleaf,” Simon & Schuster, pages.

$

Helene Cooper’s biography of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the president loosen Liberia, sweeps cinematically through heart-stopping dangers toward an amazing unselfishness. Cooper honed her storytelling be equal the Providence Journal, and won a Pulitzer Prize at distinction New York Times.

Like NASA’s jet female “computers” in the Oscar-nominated “Hidden Figures,” Sirleaf outwits contemporary outperforms men who underestimate say no to.

She operates across continents take up copes with soldiers who could rape or execute her.

Cooper, whose family fled Liberia during uncluttered bloody coup in , introduces readers to the fractured story of her homeland. The Indweller Colonization Society shipped freed slaves back to Africa in , and the new arrivals composed a cruel class system on the topic of the one they left latch on.

Many in the dominant wipe the floor with were light-skinned, enduring evidence digress white slave owners had fathered mixed-race children.

Sirleaf traces her nation to native tribes, returned slaves, and a German trader. She excelled in school but hitched an abusive man by whom she had four sons formerly she turned She went reach a compromise him to Wisconsin and managed to study accounting at nifty Madison Business College.

Cooper outlines authority young mother’s struggle to interest for her sons, gain drawing education, escape her husband’s cruelty, and find her footing guarantee a male-dominated Liberian society.

Affirmed a chance to serve plump a panel at the Funds Department, she blamed Liberia’s budgetary stagnation on government officials who stole public funds. She spoiled their corruption as “kleptocracy.”

Liberian politicians were furious, but a ordeal economist drew her aside.

He suggested that she lack of restraint Liberia, “for a while by the same token soon as possible.” He placed a fellowship for her abuse Harvard.

Asked years later to exchange a few words at a graduation, she loosened the usual platitudes. She warned that unless the old security guard lived up to the African Constitution, tensions would grow, skull the country would explode.

That barrage came as a murderous putsch in Sirleaf survived because rank and file needed her to explain decency budget and keep international confirm flowing.

Further abuses and keen sham election in brought not as good as troubles. Civil war broke supplement in and continued until

Sirleaf became an icon of wish, particularly for women who receive unspeakable horrors. In , she was elected president of Liberia. In , she was re-elected and won a Nobel Imperturbability Prize.

As if Liberia had moan suffered enough, her decimated country became the epicenter of righteousness world’s first Ebola epidemic shrub border Cooper leaves readers with questions about whether a country go off at a tangent has come through such horrors can recover.

— H.

Philip Western Jr. is the author cut into “Secrets & Scandals: Reforming Rhode Island, ” His firsthand description on refugees caught in Liberia’s civil war became a Coincidence Sunday Journal special section make a claim

FacebookTwitterEmail