Jailed, threatened with rape, torture and murder, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf refused to take a seat in the Senate of Liberia.

That was because her election was fraudulent, she told Master Sgt. Samuel Doe, who had seized power in a bloody coup. He staged the vote that named himself president and her as a senator.

Her ordeal seems to have been due to his anger at a speech she made before the rigged election.

Doe nevertheless included her in an amnesty. She escaped to America.

That was in 1985. Now at 70, she's halfway through her own term as president, the first woman chosen to head a modern African country. The U.S. State Department called her election free and fair.

As she says in her vivid and affecting memoir, Sirleaf is used to speaking her mind. As the reader can guess from the title "This Child Will Be Great" it's no exercise in false modesty.

Married at 17, she had four sons before making her first trip to America, accompanying her husband and leaving the children with relatives.

Returning home, she took a job in the Liberian treasury and divorced her husband, whom she describes as a chronic abuser. At an international conference, she made a speech predicting disaster in Liberia because of the gulf between rich and poor. She denounced her own government as a "kleptocracy" government by thieves.

A fellow conferee, a professor from Harvard, said the word was new to him. He helped her get a fellowship and ultimately a graduate degree there.

She returned to Liberia and its treasury, rising to finance minister in a nervous, reform-minded government. But it was too late. The wrongs Doe professed to right were attributed to the descendants of freed American slaves who ruled Liberia for 150 years. Though not one of them, Sirleaf was finance minister in the last of their governments one of four cabinet members spared in Doe's executions.

His bloody dictatorship was defeated by another under Charles Taylor. Sirleaf first supported Taylor, helping raise $10,000 for him, but she soon withdrew her support as Taylor's atrocities equaled or surpassed those of Doe, who was tortured and murdered. Seven years later, she quit a promising U.N. career to return home and oppose Taylor in an internationally sponsored election.

She lost, and said she refused an offer afterward of a job in Taylor's government. It was another seven years before she got a second chance. This time, she won an election against 11 other candidates with a run-off against George Weah, a world-famous soccer star.

Sirleaf said in her 2006 inaugural that more than three out of four Liberians still lived on less than $1 a day. Nearly as many were illiterate. Now she's fighting a caterpillar invasion that threatens farmers and is trying to enforce a 1912 law on free and compulsory education.

"This Child Will Be Great" (Harper, 368 pages, $26.99), by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.