Starred review from September 16, 2019
Rice, U.S. ambassador to the U.N. during the Obama administration, delivers a stellar debut memoir of her public service career. Born in 1964 in Washington, D.C., Rice credits her mother, a scholar, and father, an economics expert, with inspiring her to work hard. She graduated from Stanford University in 1986, then attended Oxford University’s New College, where she studied international relations and was “the only black person.” She then worked on national security and peacekeeping during the Clinton administration beginning in 1993, and dealt with the failed military mission made famous in Black Hawk Down (“The Somalia crisis also taught me to be skeptical of Congress’s capacity” to address national security crises, she notes). Rice broke with the Clintons in 2007 to back Obama for president and enthrallingly covers her time in Obama’s administration: she recalls her appearance on various news programs during the 2012 Benghazi controversy, after which she was branded a liar by Republicans in “a selective and misleading parsing of my Sunday show statements,” as well as successfully working with Iran in 2013 to halt its nuclear weapons program. Along the way, Rice writes of juggling work and motherhood, and of the importance of being one’s own advocate. Rice’s insightful memoir serves as an astute, analytical take on recent American political history.
October 1, 2019
Rice, former national security adviser and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under Barack Obama, reflects on her career during the Clinton and Obama administrations and her involvement in high-profile negotiations and controversial decisions. The memoir opens with Rice's childhood in Washington, DC, navigated her parent's high expectations and enduring their volatile relationship. Rice's work for the Clinton administration focused largely on African affairs and policymaking. The bulk of the book is devoted to her service as UN ambassador and national security adviser for Obama, in which she delves into key initiatives, including opening relations with Cuba and Sudan, handling the 2012 Benghazi attack, implementing the Iran nuclear deal in the years 2015-16, and taking on challenges involving ISIS. Now a Brookings Institution fellow, Rice provides additional insight into the complexity of U.S. diplomatic and national security, her day-to-day work and impressions of key players. She is tough but frank, clearly owning her successes and failures, sharing stories occasionally punctuated with anecdotes about her personal life and family. VERDICT While she offers a fascinating look into U.S. foreign policy, Rice's desire to be comprehensive can be overwhelming. Recommended for readers interested in national security and Obama-era staff memoirs.--Rebekah Kati, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
A revealing memoir of life behind the diplomatic curtains. As New York Times contributing opinion writer Rice opens her account, the Trump team is taking over the White House from Obama, for whom she served as ambassador to the U.N. A work crew is removing a carpet into which is woven a quotation from Martin Luther King Jr.: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." It's a telling moment, speaking pointedly to an atmosphere in which her young daughter suffered from stress over how her mother was treated during the Benghazi affair. "Washington's politics of personal destruction don't come free of cost," she notes. Her story recounts aspiration and affirmation, as her parents battled against the racism that dogged her father even as he served in World War II, "profoundly objecting to the insult and irony of being made to fight for freedom for all but his own people." Her father would become an economics professor, and her parents taught Rice "the merits of fierce, often cocky contention" that combined assuredness with a command of the facts. Her education in diplomacy, following school at Stanford and Oxford, was augmented by the likes of Richard Clarke ("gruff, sarcastic, whip-smart, someone who pulls no punches") and Obama, who forgave Rice for an ill-advised comment comparing how he and John McCain would react to the proverbial 3:00 a.m. phone call on some matter of war or peace. "I was tacitly benched for a few weeks and given only safer opportunities by the campaign to appear public, until the furor died down," she writes. Her book is frequently engaging though perhaps a quarter too long, and it is peppered with such critical moments as well as defenses of her stances in support of Israel and against an intransigent Russia. She closes, as one might expect, with a sharp critique of the successor administration and the "zero-sum partisan outcomes" of national politics today. Recommended reading for aspiring diplomats and foreign policy wonks.
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Starred review from September 1, 2019
The daughter of up-by-their bootstraps Jamaicans and African Americans, Rice achieved early success through disciplined hard work, intellectual brilliance, and friendships with the likes of Madeline Albright. With an award-winning PhD thesis on Zimbabwe, Rice was eminently prepared for high-level positions in the Clinton and Obama administrations. Rice's behind-the-scenes take on major foreign policy challenges are fascinating. As UN ambassador and national security advisor she played key roles in the U.S. response to the Darfur crisis, the Arab spring, Syria's civil war, and the Rwandan genocide. But it was her being scapegoated for the Benghazi disaster, in which Libyan rebels murdered four American diplomats, that exemplifies the tightrope of a career in the public eye. Forced to explain a foreign relations disaster on live TV with limited information from the state department, Rice was excoriated by political opponents, accused of incompetence and dishonesty, and ultimately forced to withdraw from consideration as secretary of state. While she prefers not to dwell on the racism and sexism of Washington, her anger comes through loud and clear. Although Rice is frank about the toll her career took on her family, she is able to look back on her experiences with pride, gratitude, and bracing realism.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)