Review by Choice Review
Mandela's autobiography would be a significant publishing event even if, as a man and a leader, he had triumphed less signally and dramatically over lengthy incarceration, entrenched white domination, and decades of bitter racial conflict. His book is indeed a testament to those striking victories. But it is also inspirational, in the best sense: Mandela's struggle, his reflections on the complexities of that struggle, and the way in which he now judges his own acts and the acts of antagonistic Afrikaners, is deeply moving. He conveys with great immediacy and feeling how the idiocy of apartheid transformed a comparatively bookish, respectful, bourgeois young African lawyer into a popular leader, an insurgent strategist, and, ultimately, into a gifted statesman. Had Mandela's powerful printed words been absorbed by Afrikaners in the 1950s and '60s, apartheid itself could never have captured the hearts and minds of so many white South Africans. Every library will want this riveting and appealing book. Good photographs and an ample index. R. I. Rotberg; Harvard University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Gr. 9^-12. Mandela tells the dramatic story of the long struggle against apartheid, his 27 years in prison, and his election as the first black president of a new, democratic South Africa.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and the first democratically elected president of South Africa, Mandela began his autobiography during the course of his 27 years in prison. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Mandela's ``long walk'' begins with his youth and moves up to his election as South Africa's president last spring. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In 1918 Nelson Mandela was born, the son of a tribal chief in the Xhosa nation. In 1994 has was elected the first black president of a South Africa newly free of apartheid. In the 76 intervening years, Mandela's path was the path of his pepole and his country: painful, obstacle-ridden, often seemingly impassable. Here the leader of black South Africans' fight for freedom details each step of that journey. He writes with respect and affection of the traditional culture in which he was raised, even of his ritual circumcision at the age of 16; and he describes with remarkable dispassion the events that aided his growing politicization, such as the failed miners' strike of 1946; his quest for dignity even while imprisoned on Robben Island; and the dramatic negotiations with President F.W. De Klerk that culminated in a peaceful revolution in South Africa. This memoir is remarkably free of polemics, self-pity, and self-aggrandizement. It is the work ofo a man who has led by action and example--a man who is one of the few genuine heroes we have.
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