The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood | 
 enlarge | Author: Helene Cooper
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
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Rating:  28 reviews
Sales Rank: 939
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.6 x 1.3
ISBN: 0743266242
Dewey Decimal Number: 921
EAN: 9780743266246
ASIN: 0743266242
Publication Date: September 2, 2008
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Product Description
Helene Cooper is "Congo," a descendant of two Liberian dynasties -- traced back to the first ship of freemen that set sail from New York in 1820 to found Monrovia. Helene grew up at Sugar Beach, a twenty-two-room mansion by the sea. Her childhood was filled with servants, flashy cars, a villa in Spain, and a farmhouse up-country. It was also an African childhood, filled with knock foot games and hot pepper soup, heartmen and neegee. When Helene was eight, the Coopers took in a foster child -- a common custom among the Liberian elite. Eunice, a Bassa girl, suddenly became known as "Mrs. Cooper's daughter."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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 23 more reviews...
 An Amazing Book!! November 24, 2008
I loved this book so much! I was embarrassed by my lack of knowledge about Liberia, and this book promted me to learn more. It is amazing though how much the book read like fiction. I was fascinated with the "characters" and it is hard to believe that such shocking events had actually occurred. I was so attached to the people in this book that I dreamt about them and dreamt of going to see the house at sugar beach myself. I am giving several copies as gift this christmas.
30 yr old male November 16, 2008
I am a 30 year old male. I got this book after an NPR review. Wow, great book, very descriptive. It paints a great picture of what it was like to be part of a country's elite. I thought I would be against the elite until I read about the coup in Monrovia and the horrible way the common man acts when he takes over. What a bunch of savages human beings really are when given a portion of power with no real possibility of consequences. Reading about the rape of the author's mother, I wanted to be there to defend her. Great read.
 A good read, but lacks depth November 10, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Though a memoir is, by definition, focused on the author's life, Cooper's work is self-centered in the extreme. She never really answers the key question -- why did she and the rest of her family abandon her foster sister for so many years? And she presents nothing more than a caricature of the lives and society of the less-privileged native Liberian people and the discrimination against them by those of her own elite and wealthy class.
Great read, fascinating biography November 10, 2008
This woman's life story is fascinating, vividly told and really mmoves one to think about the power of our beginnings. Like many brilliant and little-known individuals, her past led her to become a great writer. Would recommend this book to anyone.
Captivating! November 10, 2008
I initially wanted to read Helene Cooper's book about her childhood in Liberia as I had lived there with my family and then had returned a few years later as a Peace Corps Volunteer. We were there in the relative halcyon days from the late 1960's through the mid 1970's and Helene describes life there, albeit through the eyes of a child living a privileged life, in perfect unison with my memories (likewise influenced by privilege but as an outsider to the culture.) She stirred up memories of my family's and friends' favorite beach (Cooper's Beach aka Sugar Beach) with it's primeval lagoon (one wouldn't have been surprised to see dinosaurs emerge from it's very depths.) Also, she conjured up the Relda Cinema being the "happenin' place", the drive through Sinkor, the harridan old Congo women who maintained their hegemony by being the scariest people on earth, but most of all, the visceral impact of the smell of the place when the airplane door opened and all of Africa rushed over one's senses.
As I read, no, tore, through the book, I found clarification to questions that I and anyone ever connected to Liberia ask ourselves almost daily. What happened to Liberia? How did the seemingly most peaceful country on earth descend into such acts of unspeakable brutality that any attempt to describe it ends with stuttering and unfinished sentences? Ms Cooper's careful historical research of the first "settlers" to Liberia and the subsequent formation of that unique society called "Americo-Liberian" or "Congo people" and how they interacted with the larger population of the indigenous people sets the stage for much of the murder and mayhem yet to come. Certainly, there are other players and influences in the destruction of Liberia. America dropping Liberia like a hot potato at the end of the Cold War, the wanton plunder of "blood diamonds" and gold controlled by war lords who probably had links to Al Queda, etc. Many theories abound, but certainly the social inequities that weren't addressed in Liberia for nearly 150 years set the groundwork for the destruction of the country.
"The House at Sugar Beach" is a very personal story and one grows to really care about all of the people in Ms Cooper's circle. I think even if a reader had no prior knowledge of Liberia at all they would find this book a compelling, well written spellbinder. It is a peek into a subculture that was unique on the earth and is forever changed. The descendants of American freed slaves who were sent to a hostile environment and set up a world much as what they'd just left, only now they were Missy and Boss and they seemed to see no irony in that. What transpired in their lives was very much the West African version of "Gone With the Wind" and as I delicately tread upon this metaphor, Ms Cooper, just like Miss Scarlet, leaves us with a sense of although the world as we know it is gone, she and her people will be survivors.
It's a great book and I heartily recommend it!
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