Book of the week: Extraordinary, Ordinary People by Condoleezza Rice

(Crown, 342 pages, $27)

Condoleezza Rice’s understated new memoir begs to be read between the lines, said Darryl Lorenzo Wellington in The Christian Science Monitor. A native of Birmingham, Ala., Rice was just 9 in 1963 when a girl she knew was one of four killed in their Baptist church by an infamous Ku Klux Klan bombing. Because the future secretary of state doesn’t tie that memory to her later career, a reader is forced to speculate. Rice’s father, a Presbyterian minister, spent many nights after the bombing sitting on his porch with a gun, ready to defend his family and community if the Klan returned. “Because of this experience,” Rice writes, “I’m a fierce defender of the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms.” What she doesn’t say is that the memory probably also explains why she eventually “trained to become an expert in the defense of her country.”

Rice’s father certainly looms large in his daughter’s account of her early life, said Stephen L. Carter in The Daily Beast. Rice credits her mother, a teacher, for pushing her in school. But it’s her father who seems to have shaped her political beliefs. The Rev. John Rice mostly eschewed Martin Luther King Jr.’s brand of nonviolent resistance and even came to prefer the more militant ideas of Stokely Carmichael. Though a law-abiding Republican, he admired anyone willing to “confront America’s racism with strength and pride rather than” as a supplicant, writes Rice. By focusing on personal achievement, and making herself into one of the nation’s foremost experts on the Soviet Union, Rice did exactly what her father wanted. Do her black critics really think she should have turned down either of the Bush White Houses when they called her seeking help?

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Unfortunately, Rice’s book “ends where most readers would rather it began”—with George W. Bush’s 2000 election, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. She makes it clear that a second book will pick up her story from there. But what’s most frustrating about this memoir is that Rice seems to be holding back the intellect and passion that allowed her to rise so high in both academia and Washington. As an “origins story,” Extraordinary, Ordinary People is “teeming with fascinating detail.” But if Rice’s sharp mind is what you come to this book for, reading it “is like watching a Toyota Prius compete in the Indianapolis 500.”