10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Introducing young students to the public career of Condoleeza Rice, September 7, 2005
This review is from: Condoleezza Rice: U.S. Secretary of State (Journey to Freedom: The African American Library) (Hardcover)
It is great to see that the Journey to Freedom series of the African American Library continues to publish new volumes. This spring the series published the new volumes "The Amistad Mutiny: Fighting for Freedom," "Arthur Ashe: Athlete and Activist," "The Blues: Birth of an American Sound," "Brown vs. Board of Education: The Battle for Equal Education," "Miles Davis: Jazz Master," and this one on "Condoleezza Rice: U.S. Secretary of State" (you can tell the most recent volumes simply because they have subtitles). Whereas the volume on Colin Powell was published before he became the first African American Secretary of State (it ends with him deciding not to run for president in 1996), this volume by Kevin Cunningham is able to tell the entire story of how Rice became the second African American (and second woman after Madeleine Albright) to hold the senior position in the Cabinet.
The story begins with Rice being born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1954, the daughter of teachers (her mother played the piano and organ and Rice's first name is an Italian musical term to play "with sweetness"). As is always the case in the books in this series, this allows photographs (the "Colored Entrance" to a segregated theater) and examples of what life was like growing up in the Jim Crow south (Rice was a friend of one of the four girls killed by the bomb at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963). Of course, this entire series underscores what things have been like in the past (often the recent past) to set up the accomplishments of these noted African-Americans.
Although she was bored with studying government, Rice ended up being interested in the Soviet Union and in a career in international relations. The move from civil rights to the Cold War is presented as being a conflict on a larger stage. Rice's expertise on the Soviet Union not only gets her a teaching position at Stanford University, but also gets her noticed by Brent Scowcroft, the national security advisor for President George H. W. Bush (since most young people only associate Rice with George W. Bush, the current president, this shows she has been around for a while). Cunningham then traces the steps by which Rice ended up becoming part of the current Bush White House, first as NSA and now as Sec. State.
The one thing I did not pick up from this book was an idea of Rice's political theory of international relations. But then you will not find out who was the member of the Denver Broncos that Rice was engaged to, so get used to the disappointment. Then again, most of us have to go back to Henry Kissinger to name a U.S. Secretary of State where we have an idea of how they say the world and what they were trying to accomplish. Cunningham does point out that Rice pushed for the reunification of Germany, so there is at least one significant example where she advocated a position and was proven right.
In addition to laying out the steps by which Rice went from Birmingham to the State Department, Cunningham emphasizes how being a black woman in a white man's world (especially when it comes to studying the Soviet Union), got Rice noticed, but that it was her abilities that kept her moving up the ladder. One nice thing about being the first African-American woman to be Secretary of State is that the next African-American or the next woman will be the third of each and therefore hardly worth noting. You can see that now with the pending Bush decision on a Supreme Court appointment where the potential nomination of the first Hispanic is seen as more newsworthy than what would be the third woman. Still, young readers will get a sense of how being the "first" can open the doors for a whole lot of others to follow.
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