Condoleezza Rice: An American Life: A Biography

Elisabeth Bumiller

Dec 2007 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Kimberly Farr

About this audiobook

Condoleezza Rice has until now remained a mystery behind an elegant, cool veneer. In this stunning new biography, New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller peels back the layers and presents a revelatory portrait of the first black female secretary of state and President George W. Bush’s national security adviser on September 11, 2001. The audiobook relates the personal voyage of a young black woman out of the segregated American South and also tells the sweeping story of a tumultuous half-century in the nation’s history.

In CONDOLEEZZA RICE: AN AMERICAN LIFE, we see Rice’s Alabama childhood in Birmingham when it was the central battleground of the civil rights movement; her education in foreign policy; and her confrontations with minorities and women while she was provost at Stanford University in the 1990s. Examining the current administration, Bumiller explores in depth Rice’s extraordinarily close relationship with George W. Bush, her battles with Vice President Dick Cheney, and her indirect but crucial role in the ousting of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Bumiller shows us Rice missing clues to the September 11 attacks and waging war against Saddam Hussein. In addition, we watch Rice’s recent attempts to salvage the ruins of the Iraq policy she helped create and to avoid war with Iran.

Drawing on extensive interviews with Rice and more than 150 others, Bumiller explores Rice’s effectiveness as national security adviser and secretary of state, her longtime political ambitions, and her future on the world stage.

About the author

Elisabeth Bumiller, a Washington reporter for The New York Times, was a Times White House correspondent from September 10, 2001, to 2006. She is the author of May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons: A Journey Among the Women of India and The Secrets of Mariko: A Year in the Life of a Japanese Woman and Her Family. Bumiller lives in the Washington, DC, area with her husband, Steven R. Weisman, and two children.

Kimberly Farr has appeared on Broadway, at the New York Shakespeare Festival, the Roundabout Theatre, Playwright's Horizons, and the American Place. She created the role of Eve in Arthur Miller's first and only musical, Up from Paradise, which was directed by the author. She appeared with Vanessa Redgrave in the Broadway production of The Lady from the Sea. She has also acted in regional theaters from Los Angeles to New Haven, Connecticut, including the original production of The 1940's Radio Hour at Washington, DC's Arena Stage.