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Interns Needed

Condi’s impersonal story is

chillingly accurate

Condi: The Condoleezza Rice Story by Antonia Rice
Pocket Books 302 pp., illus.
$6.99
ISBN#:  0-7434-8623-4

by Kam Williams                

"From her childhood in Birmingham, Alabama, which in the 1950s and 1960s was the most segregated city in the South and a focal point of the Civil Rights movement, to her ascension to one of the most powerful posts in government, Condoleezza Rice's story is founded on a compelling family legacy. She is a proud daughter of the Rices and the Rays, two lineages devoted to education and achievement. She is also very much her father's daughter, a preacher's child devoted to the same causes, solidified with the same strengths of character, and supported by the same faith." -- Excerpted from the Prelude

Playing it very close to the vest, Antonia Felix has scripted a bio of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, which reads more like an extended fanzine than an intimate memoir. Ms. Felix, who has also cooperated on authorized biographies of First Lady Laura Bush, ex-presidential hopeful General Wesley Clark and former New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman, manages to excise any excitement out of her subject by writing in a flat, encyclopedic style that would work well on a resume'.

In slow order, we learn that Condi was born in Birmingham on November 14, 1954, was raised by supportive parents who told this piano prodigy she could achieve anything. She entered the University of Denver at 15 where her plans for a musical career gradually gave way to a burgeoning interest in political science. After completing a doctorate in political science, she became a thinker at The Hoover Institute, a conservative think-tank. This set her on the right-wing road, which ended at the White House.

All Condi offers are extended bullet points of each of her impressive achievements. She includes stints with the Council on Foreign Relations to the board of trustees at Notre Dame to the boards of directors of Chevron, TransAmerica, Charles Schwab, J.P. Morgan, and Hewlett-Packard Corporations. It might have been nice to get a palpable sense of how this black woman from the South feels about having crossed the color line and shattered the glass ceiling.

 Too impersonal to recommend as anything other than a reference text.