Saturday, December 4, 2010

Extraordinary, Ordinary People...by Condoleezza Rice

My 48th book! Been a long break since my last book. This is a memoir of a triumph of family values and unity over racism and prejudices, that if we believe in ourselves we can be anyone we want.

Condoleezza Rice is no stranger to me. Used to admire her cos she was the first lady to be appointed as the US National Security Advisor. She was also the US Secretary of State too. Prior that she had a remarkable career at Stanford University too.

To put it simply, I enjoyed reading this book. Her parents believed in her. They invested in her. They sacrificed for her; how they got her a grand piano because they believed in the best for her. Reading about Rice's success also reminds me that segregation (she grew up at a time of great racial prejudices) often squeezes the more than the best out of the segregated. Rice wrote about how her parents and community created a parallel world to the ugly one which separated the blacks from whites in America; a world which enabled her to grow into her full potential despite everything.

Ordinary people can become extraordinary when pushed by extraordinary circumstances... Rice, her parents and her community was part of that equation. Similarly here in Malaysia, the Chinese has achieved success despite double standards... partly because the extraordinary bias in our system requires them to dig into the extraordinary, hence the extraordinary successes that we seem to hear about so much.

1 comment:

Tan Qian Hui said...

It's nice to meet someome who loves reading as much as me. Ii'm very obsessive about reading, especially stories about magic. Once I pick up a book, there's no stopping me. I can read in cars, in busesand also in shopping complexes. I recently read The Black Magician Trilogy by Trudi Canavan. It consists of three books-The Magician's Guild, The Novice, and The High Lord. I simply loved tose books, because they were full of twists and turns.If you have time, you should read these too.

Broken?

Education in doldrums... An already broken education system given a really hard whack by Covid-19.  I used to read about pandemics, that a b...