Twice as Good : Condoleezza Rice and Her Path to Power

Who is Condoleezza Rice? Award-winning Newsweek editor Marcus Mabry explores the contradictions―personal and public―of one of the most influential, controversial, and fascinating women in the history of American politics.

Before becoming the first female African-American secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice was the first woman to be named national security advisor to the president of the United States and, before that, the first woman, first minority, and youngest person to be named provost of Stanford University. Yet for all her ceiling-shattering accomplishments, Rice remains enigmatic. Mabry's penetrating, multilayered study of Rice is the most comprehensive portrait ever reported of this powerful woman. It was an editor's choice of The New York Times' Book Review.

MARCUS MABRY, now chief of correspondents at Newsweek, was formerly a State Department and foreign correspondent for the magazine and has written on foreign policy for more than a decade. He lives in New York.