The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood

The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood

by Helene Cooper
368 pages

Starbucks has picked The House at Sugar Beach by Helene Cooper, a memoir about growing up "elite" in Liberia, as its latest book to be featured at all Starbucks in the US. A brief AP article about this announcement is available here:
http://canadianpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5hHCbk27oE5n13vvn7zyqGISqA-BA

An excerpt of the book can be found here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/magazine/06Liberian-t.html?_r=1&ex=1208404800&en=fef8441d3b2745b5&ei=5070&emc=eta1&oref=slogin

A review from Amazon.com:

From Publishers Weekly
Journalist Cooper has a compelling story to tell: born into a wealthy, powerful, dynastic Liberian family descended from freed American slaves, she came of age in the 1980s when her homeland slipped into civil war. On Cooper's 14th birthday, her mother gives her a diamond pendant and sends her to school. Cooper is convinced that somehow our world would right itself. That afternoon her uncle Cecil, the minister of foreign affairs, is executed. Cooper combines deeply personal and wide-ranging political strands in her memoir. There's the halcyon early childhood in Africa, a history of the early settlement of Liberia, an account of the violent, troubled years as several regimes are overthrown, and the story of the family's exile to America. A journalist-as-a-young-woman narrative unfolds as Cooper reports the career path that led her from local to national papers in the U.S. The stories themselves are fascinating, but a flatness prevails—perhaps one that mirror's the author's experience. After her uncle's televised execution, Cooper does the same thing I would do for the rest of my life when something bad happens: I focus on something else. I concentrate on minutiae. It's the only way to keep going when the world has ended. (May)