Starbucks picks new featured book

Starbucks has chosen another memoir by a West African to feature in its stores nationwide, according to the Associated Press.

The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood (Simon & Schuster, 368 pages, 425), by New York Times reporter Helene Cooper, is a memoir about growing up in Liberia during that country's civil war.

Helene Cooper

Ishmael Beah's Long Way Gone, about being a boy soldier in Sierra Leone, was picked last year and became a best seller despite questions over how long Beah actually fought.

''I remember going into my local Starbucks on K Street in Washington for my morning coffee on my way to work, and seeing Long Way Gone on the counter,'' Cooper said in a statement released by Starbucks. ''I was thrilled for him as a fellow West African -- and so envious myself at the same time! I'm not ashamed to say that I stood in line daydreaming that one day it would be me. I'm absolutely thrilled."

Publisher's Weekly had this to say about The House at Sugar Beach:

"Journalist Cooper has a compelling story to tell: born into a wealthy, powerful, dynastic Liberian family descended from freed American slaves, she came of age in the 1980s when her homeland slipped into civil war. Cooper combines deeply personal and wide-ranging political strands in her memoir. A journalist-as-a-young-woman narrative unfolds as Cooper reports the career path that led her from local to national papers in the U.S. The stories themselves are fascinating..."