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

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For years the Cooper daughters -- Helene, her sister Marlene, and Eunice -- blissfully enjoyed the trappings of wealth and advantage. But Liberia was like an unwatched pot of water left boiling on the stove. And on April 12, 1980, a group of soldiers staged a coup d'état, assassinating President William Tolbert and executing his cabinet. The Coopers and the entire Congo class were now the hunted, being imprisoned, shot, tortured, and raped. After a brutal daylight attack by a ragtag crew of soldiers, Helene, Marlene, and their mother fled Sugar Beach, and then Liberia, for America. They left Eunice behind.

A world away, Helene tried to assimilate as an American teenager. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill she found her passion in journalism, eventually becoming a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. She reported from every part of the globe -- except Africa -- as Liberia descended into war-torn, third-world hell.

In 2003, a near-death experience in Iraq convinced Helene that Liberia -- and Eunice -- could wait no longer. At once a deeply personal memoir and an examination of a violent and stratified country, The House at Sugar Beach tells of tragedy, forgiveness, and transcendence with unflinching honesty and a survivor's gentle humor. And at its heart, it is a story of Helene Cooper's long voyage home.

What Customers Say About The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood:

Most of the book was about a girl growing up. The author didn't get to the part about leaving her "sister" in Liberia until almost the end of the book. I had been hoping for more of a story about feelings of being African and leaving her "sister" and country behind. I was expecting more. Much of the book could have been written about any girl growing up in the United States (playing, going out with parents, friends, first boyfriend, etc).

I didn't like any of the characters, and it all seemed too improbable. I was in the minority of my book club on this one. I just couldn't get into it.

After her education in the U.S. I'm glad I came across it and read it. The founders established themselves as a privileged class, into which Helene Cooper was born, a wealthy internationally-sophisticated little girl in an impoverished nation.

The story is driven by the hopes of the protagonist, and the dynamic tension between nations and races. It's a wonderful book that I highly recommend. It offers insights into human dynamics and world history I didn't even know I didn't know.

Helene Cooper grew up in Liberia, the African country founded by freed American slaves in the early 19th century. The book ends with a poignant scene of homecoming, one of the best I've seen in any memoir. I "read" the audio book which includes some lovely oral language arts, as Helene offers colorful samples of Liberian English.

When she was 13, her world was torn apart by violent, tribal anarchy. she became a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, and then after traveling the world, returned to her homeland.

Nearly all the Americo-Liberians are interrelated, yet Cooper does not once mention Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, whose former husband was raised by the Coopers and who became in her own right the first woman elected to the Presidency of an African nation. Does Angie Brooks not matter to Sirleaf because her story may diminish the accomplishments of Sirleafs claims as Liberias most phenomenal woman.

Liberian elites still want to decide who is important and who isn't. Liberians have a rich heritage as Africas oldest republic yet the trauma they endured over the last 25 years, as a failed state, and their attempt to correct the ugliness of the past, seems to have given them amnesia when it comes to telling their own story.

I enjoyed reading Ms. Madame Sirleaf makes the same mistake in her recent book as well when she does not mention once the name of Angie Brooks Randolph the most revered and accomplished Liberian woman of her time before the coup in 1980 that fought so hard to rewrite the wrongs of the past.

By not mentioning these important figures that have shaped their lives, their books show a scholarly limitation and a form of ethnocentrism that they must put behind them if their works are too truely inspire the next generation of scholars. Coopers chronicle of her life on Sugar Beach as a member of one of Liberias most revered families, yet I can't help but think that the book needed to give us more insight into the divisions that brought about her estrangement from her native born foster sister and still divide Africa's oldest republic.

Does Sirleaf extroardinary journey not matter to Cooper because Sirleaf was a native born member of the elite and not an Americo despite the common time frame of her story.

I could not stop reading. This could be the best book I've read in quite some time.