Condoleezza Rice - A memoir of my extraordinary, ordinary family and me

Condi's memoir is quite an interesting and easy read. I asked my daughter, who is an "A"level  student and wanted to go places to purchase it together with her other book "No higher honour".  Her schoolmates didn't have an idea who Condoleezza Rice was. I thought "what a shame, in this day and age...what do young ones read?". 

The book has given me a good basis to understand the period around the Jim Crow laws and the infamous  segregation and desegregation periods. My daughter, who wants to be a lawyer, has been wondering whether people must follow unjust laws. This is a million dollar question because there are no easy answers. Reading Condi's book made me realise that the answer to this question is not always black or white...sometimes it is grey.

On the lighter side, I could relate to the family's reaction on the mistake made on Condi's high school diploma by missing out one 'z' from her name.  The family was sufficiently irritated by the mistake on a name that had been painstakingly given by her mother, to promptly return the wrongly named diploma to the school for correction. (What was surprising is that they never got a response back until she was at the White House!!!) This reminds me of a question on Lucy Kellaway's blog in The Financial Times last week. A lady was mulling about taking on her husband's name because it was complicated whereas she had been endowed with what was, in her culture and place, an easier name - Smith.  In my neck of the woods, the very well meaning educationalists found it a pain pronouncing our names and to solve their problem, decided that we should be given names foreign to our tongues but which of course were easier for them to relate to.  To achieve their objective, they told well meaning congregations that some of our original names were "evil". At school, without the advantage of a baptism, the teacher took it upon herself (or himself) to provide a new name.  My considered view is that the apparent difficulty in a name depends on the culture, place, country, dominant language...such that one man's meat is another man's poison.  My friends and relatives could barely get round to pronouncing the Irish name that my father so well meaningly bestowed upon me and I have heard so many versions of it that grate against my ear.  I am sure that my father probably didn't pronounce it in exactly the same way as the Irish did but he got the spelling right ...Although common in Ireland and appears in the Oxford Advanced Learners' dictionary as a "common English" forename, I was recently amazed to learn that it is in fact a Greek given name meaning "fate".

Oftentimes, it is so difficult to get bureaucracies to amend mistakes they make on documents and one has to adjust to the unfortunate baptism even as Oprah did.  I noticed  a date of birth mistake on my son's GCE's certificate.  It irritated me to the core and I promptly informed the school. When they did not want to admit their mistake, I hit the roof and they thankfully asked me to return the wrong certificates for correction...I hope they amend them since I have no chance of serving at high echelons of any government.

In many ways, I like Condi.  I can relate her experiences to another recent post in The Financial Times on whether, in public organisations, one needed to be 'mousy' to succeed. People posted all manner of advice supporting this theorem.  I wonder what Condi would have said given her response at Stanford, to the surprise of her audience, that she would consult widely but at the end of day, she and the chancellor would make the ultimate decisions. She didn't do committees as committees don't make decisions!!!.  Working as I have done in large organizations, I am wont to agree that the best way to stall on something is to ask a committee to opine on it. 

In certain situations one has to be "bullish". Condi was a tough woman for her stature. In her whole book, I loved two expressions and I shall attempt to quote them verbatim. "You don't have the standing to question my commitment to minorities. I have been black all my life and that is longer than you are old"..."When you are the provost, you can have the last word"!!!! Woah!!! That hurts!!
 

On the one hand, she was really misunderstood and the book, I wager, was her medium of explaining herself  to her critics.  (At Stanford, although a respectable position for her age, gender and colour, the headlines about her were brutal and criticisms unrelenting.)  Whereas on the other hand, she appears to have had very loving parents, an enviable childhood and a tight family...almost unreal. (Yet, despite all that, she didn't see the need to perpetuate the lineage. It would be interesting to have a psychologist's opinion since the considered view is that people born into steady homes are more likely to want to perpetuate the institution.)

 

I enjoy the scholarly pursuit of reading people's biographies and autobiographies...no matter the person...as one often realises that one cannot always have it all.