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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!