American Warlord

Starred review from January 15, 2015
Shocking page-turner about Liberian dictator Charles Taylor's American-born son, Chucky, the first U.S citizen to be federally prosecuted for torture. Journalist Dwyer's debut impresses as both old-fashioned immersive journalism and a grisly narrative using the Taylors' rise and fall as an unforgiving lens through which to view recent West African history. Charles Taylor's transformation from a leftist bureaucrat to a destructive warlord was one of the persistent political nightmares of the 1990s, but few knew at the time that he'd recruited his estranged teenage son. "Liberia," writes the author, "presented to Chucky the possibility that he was heir to something larger." Chucky had already shown attraction to "gangster" culture during his suburban Florida adolescence. Immersion in his father's court led him to evince sociopathic tendencies, and he was once tasked with developing a new paramilitary force, the Anti-Terrorist Unit. Initially, his depredations were merely urban legend against the larger backdrop of his father's cynical promotion of proxy wars. Once Taylor was elected president, Dwyer writes, "[h]e could not be called a criminal, because he had legalized all the rackets." Yet things fell apart for Taylor in 2003, when he was both deposed by rebels and indicted by the U.N.'s Special Court for Sierra Leone. Chucky fled to Trinidad, but after two years, he attempted to re-enter the U.S. and was immediately arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. "Prosecuting torture was complicated," writes the author. "It had simply never happened." Yet the government assembled a damning case against Chucky, eliciting testimony from several torture victims, resulting in a 97-year sentence. Dwyer deftly captures both the larger implications of Taylor's reign and the human-scaled horror of his son's descent: "Chucky's story had been improbable and at times surreal, but its brutality was real." A dark triumph-a meticulous geopolitical narrative and gripping tale of an American son lost to evil.

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February 15, 2015
Chucky Taylor grew up with the challenges to staying grounded amid the temptations of the street that many black male youths face. In his case, he had the added distraction of an estranged father, Charles Taylor, who was a warlord in Liberia. In 1992, 15-year-old Chucky traveled to Liberia to be reunited with his father, who would later became president of the long-troubled nation. The chance to dodge legal problems in the U.S. and to become part of the entourage of his swaggering father in a nation up for grabs was too much to resist. Chucky eventually became commander of the notorious Anti-Terrorist Unit, the Demon Forces charged with protecting brutal President Taylor. Taylor was finally toppled and eventually indicted on human rights violations. After fleeing Liberia, Chucky was eventually caught trying to reenter the U.S. and later became the first American convicted of the war crime of torture. Dwyer offers a totally fascinating account of the brutality of both father and son and the long struggle of an African nation tied to the U.S. since the time of slavery.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

November 1, 2014

In 1992, happy-go-lucky 15-year-old Chucky Taylor ventured from Florida to Liberia to see warlord Charles Taylor, a future president of the country and his estranged father. There, he became commander of the infamous Anti-Terrorist Unit and, under his father's rule, committed such breathtakingly brutal acts of violence that when he was captured trying to slip home after the government fell, he became the first American convicted of the war crime of torture. With a 40,000-copy first printing.

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February 15, 2015

Reporter Dwyer (Rolling Stone, Esquire, Time) attempts to trace the history of Liberia's worst decades through the rise-and-fall life stories of Charles Taylor (b. 1948), former president of Liberia, convicted war criminal, and West African warlord; and his American-born son "Chucky" Taylor, who first came to Liberia as a teenager to meet his absent father--and returned to serve eventually as the nominal head of one of the dictator's brutal security agencies. Dwyer's title is a misnomer: Charles Taylor is not an American and Chucky was never more than a sadistic thug with a gun and his father's government authority, but the author has used the label "American Warlord" to draw public attention to the story since he began writing about Chucky in magazines seven years ago. Most of the information about Taylor's role in the destruction of Liberia and neighboring countries is covered in Colin M. Waugh's Charles Taylor and Liberia, but Dwyer's focus on Chucky, quotations from the wives of Taylors senior and junior, and the author's reporting on the now-imprisoned father's and son's criminal trials update and humanize the inhuman story. VERDICT Important for readers interested in conflicts in West Africa. [See Prepub Alert, 10/13/14.]--Joel Neuberg, Santa Rosa Junior Coll. Lib., CA

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.