House at Sugar Beach (Cooper) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
At its heart, The House at Sugar Beach is a coming-of-age story told with unremitting honesty. With her pedigree and her freedom from internalized racism, Cooper is liberated to enjoy a social universe that is a fluid mix of all things American and African…While Cooper's memoir is mesmerizing in its portrayal of a Liberia rarely witnessed, its description of the psychological devastation—and coping mechanisms—brought on by profound loss is equally captivating.
Caroline Elkins - New York Times


The House at Sugar Beach is her dramatic memoir of Liberia in the years preceding and after its savage revolution in 1980…a brilliant spotlight on a land too long forgotten. Through Cooper, we breathe Liberia's coal smoke and fish-tangy air; we taste its luscious palm butter on rice and hear the charming patter of Liberian English. We trot to church, to the family plantation and to Grandma's house.
Wendy Kann - Washington Post


Among Cooper's aims in becoming a journalist were to reveal the atrocities committed in her native country. With amazing forthrightness, she has done so, delivering an eloquent, if painful, history of the African migratory experience.
Ms. Magazine


This stunning memoir by journalist Helene Cooper relates her early years living at the Sugar Beach estate in Liberia until a coup d'état drove her mother, sister and her to America, where they attempted to fit in. The story is a sprawling, epic tale of struggle and survival in the face of adversity, and Cooper relates it with a genuine and emotional voice. As Cooper's tale unfolds, her intimate reading draws listeners into the family as their journey begins. Cooper may not read with a lot of frills and thrills in her somber voice, but the experience is affecting and indelible.
Publishers Weekly


Cooper, a New York Times diplomatic correspondent, writes of her life as a privileged Liberian ultimately forced to emigrate to the United States. Sometimes humorous, at other times shocking, she is always engaging and informative although not highly reflective. Cooper describes her comfortable life in an elite Liberian family, introducing her relatives, the family servants, and Liberian language, culture, and society. In 1980, when she was a teenager, Samuel Kanyon Doe's coup d'état ended it all. The horrors of those times-the televised executions (whose victims included friends and relatives), the rapes (of her mother and schoolmates), and the recruitment of children as soldiers-are all clearly rendered. The most compelling chapters in Cooper's memoir, which goes up to her revisiting Liberia in 2003, profile a Liberian named Eunice whose tribe was living in the country when Cooper's American ancestors arrived. Her parents took in Eunice as a companion for Helene, and they became lifelong friends. Eunice's life swung from poverty to wealth (with the Coopers) and back to poverty (when the Coopers moved to America); why she did not go with them is not clear. A great book discussion selection; recommended for academic and public libraries.
Tonya Briggs - Library Journal


In her warm, conversational tone, Helene Cooper vividly evokes the sights, sounds, and smells of Liberia for readers as she describes the customs, history, and culture of her native land.... Like the best nonfiction—and journalism—Cooper’s gripping coming-of-age story enlightens and inspires, often reading like a novel. In sum, it is a very personal and honest memoir from a gifted writer.
Bookmarks Magazine


A contemplative memoir of a privileged life in a poor place. The house of the title stood, and perhaps still stands, 11 miles from Monrovia, the capital of Liberia. Born there in 1966, New York Times special correspondent Cooper (whose beat is now Condoleezza Rice) had the run of that "perfect and perfectly grand paradise," with its five bedrooms and three bathrooms and baby grand piano, all "protected from the ravages of West African squalor and poverty by central air-conditioning, strategically placed coconut trees, and a private water well." Yet, though perched on a hill above the rest, the house was no fortress. As Cooper writes, it was a magnet for rogues-burglars, that is, as distinct from thieves, who "worked for the government and stole money from the public treasury." Lighter-skinned than many of her compatriots, Cooper was also an "Honorable," one of the ethnic and social elite who lorded it over the poorer "Country" people of Liberia. A Country man with a Harvard doctorate, notes the author, would still rank below an Honorable "with a two-bit degree from some community college in Memphis, Tennessee." In childhood games, it was the Honorables who got to shoot the Country people, and the Country people who got to play dead. Such are the perfect ingredients for a civil war, and civil war is what came. When it did, led by Master Sergeant Samuel Kanyon Doe, members of Cooper's family were killed, her mother raped, an adopted sister lost, her family scattered and sent into exile in America. These terrible events occur at the book's midpoint. What remains-rendered with aching nostalgia and wonderful language ("Wartime come, when they be evacuating people, you will be glad I not try into get on no helicopter in heels")—is a voyage of return, through which the author seeks to recover the past and to find that missing sister, even as the war deepens over the years to come. Elegant and eloquent, and full of news from places about which we know too little.
Kirkus Reviews