Book review: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf by Pamela Scully

In scarcely 100 short pages, this excellent addition to the Ohio Short Histories of Africa series offers a valuable perspective on Liberia’s outgoing President, and Africa’s first elected female Head of State. With its small size yet wide scope, it sometimes reads less as a biography of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and more as a potted history of the Republic of Liberia from the American Colonization Society to the Ebola crisis. It is none the worse for that, writes Calum Fisher.