Not a Hint of the Storms in the Offing

By Dwight Garner

New York Times, published: October 12, 2010

EXTRAORDINARY, ORDINARY PEOPLE

A Memoir of Family

By Condoleeza Rice

342 pages. Illustrated. Crown Archetype. $27.

Condoleezza Rice’s memoir, “Extraordinary, Ordinary People,” ends where most readers would probably rather it began: with the 2000 election, the recount in Florida and the Supreme Court ruling that put George W. Bush in the White House.

There’s nothing about the toxic events on the near horizon — 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the rippling policy misadventures that reverberated from each — events in which the author played crucial and controversial roles. That’s all for later and perhaps more invigorating books. (Ms. Rice is scheduled to deliver a policy memoir in 2012.)

“Extraordinary, Ordinary People” is instead an origins story, a minor-key memoir mostly about Ms. Rice’s upbringing in Birmingham, Ala., during the early years of the civil rights movement. Her parents, both teachers, were striving and selfless members of that city’s black bourgeoisie. They sacrificed nearly everything so that their talented only child could become a sleek, heat-seeking, success-driven missile.

This memoir is teeming with fascinating detail. It explains why Ms. Rice’s father, John Wesley Rice Jr., who was also a Presbyterian pastor, became a Republican. (The city’s Democratic machine prevented blacks from voting, while Republicans welcomed them.) It speaks of his decision not to march with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Birmingham in 1963 and of his unlikely friendship with the future Black Panther Party leader Stokely Carmichael. Her father liked, she writes, “the contestation of ideas.”

Full review at NYT.