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Crown Publishers
April 2009
On Sale: March 30, 2009
256 pages ISBN: 0307460681 EAN: 9780307460684 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
We long for heroes and have too few. Nelson Mandela, who
recently celebrated his ninety-first birthday, is the
closest thing the world has to a secular saint. He
liberated a country from a system of violent prejudice and
helped unite oppressor and oppressed in a way that had never
been done before. Now Richard Stengel, the editor of Time magazine, has
distilled countless hours of intimate conversation with
Mandela into fifteen essential life lessons. For nearly
three years, including the critical period when Mandela
moved South Africa toward the first democratic elections in
its history, Stengel collaborated with Mandela on his
autobiography and traveled with him everywhere. Eating with
him, watching him campaign, hearing him think out loud,
Stengel came to know all the different sides of this complex
man and became a cherished friend and colleague. In Mandela’s Way, Stengel recounts the moments in which “the
grandfather of South Africa” was tested and shares the
wisdom he learned: why courage is more than the absence of
fear, why we should keep our rivals close, why the answer is
not always either/or but often “both,” how important it is
for each of us to find something away from the world that
gives us pleasure and satisfaction—our own garden. Woven
into these life lessons are remarkable stories—of Mandela’s
childhood as the protégé of a tribal king, of his early
days as a freedom fighter, of the twenty-seven-year
imprisonment that could not break him, and of his new and
fulfilling marriage at the age of eighty. This compact book is profoundly inspiring. It captures the
spirit of this extraordinary man—warrior, martyr, husband,
statesman, and moral leader—and spurs us to look within
ourselves, reconsider the things we take for granted, and
contemplate the legacy we’ll leave behind.
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