A new book by famous anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela, Conversations with Myself will be released today and launched in 20 languages worldwide. The book is a collection of personal archive of letters and journals giving more glimpses into the heart, soul and spirit of one of the greatest leaders in modern history.
The forward was written by U.S. President Barack Obama.
“One issue that deeply worried me in prison was the false image I unwittingly projected to the outside world; of being regarded as a saint,” Mandela said in an extract.
“I never was one, even on the basis of an earthly definition of a saint as a sinner who keeps trying,” he added.
“I tried to imagine Mandela -- the legend who had changed history -- as Mandela the man who had sacrificed so much for change,” Obama remarked in the forward of the book.
~ By Ekenyerengozi Michael Chima, author of Children of Heaven, Scarlet Tears of London, Bye, Bye Mugabe and Barack Obama and the American Dream
Nelson Mandela is widely considered to be one of the most inspiring and iconic figures of our age. Now, after a lifetime of taking pen to paper to record thoughts and events, hardships and victories, he has bestowed his entire extant personal papers, which offer an unprecedented insight into his remarkable life.
A singular international publishing event, Conversations with Myself draws on Mandela’s personal archive of never-before-seen materials to offer unique access to the private world of an incomparable world leader. Journals kept on the run during the anti-apartheid struggle of the early 1960s; diaries and draft letters written in Robben Island and other South African prisons during his twenty-seven years of incarceration; notebooks from the postapartheid transition; private recorded conversations; speeches and correspondence written during his presidency—a historic collection of documents archived at the Nelson Mandela Foundation is brought together into a sweeping narrative of great immediacy and stunning power. An intimate journey from Mandela’s first stirrings of political consciousness to his galvanizing role on the world stage, Conversations with Myself illuminates a heroic life forged on the front lines of the struggle for freedom and justice.
While other books have recounted Mandela’s life from the vantage of the present, Conversations with Myself allows, for the first time, unhindered insight into the human side of the icon.
About the Author
NELSON MANDELA was born in Transkei, South Africa, on July 18, 1918. He joined the African National Congress in 1944 and was engaged in resistance against the ruling National Party’s apartheid policies after 1948. From 1964 to 1982, he was incarcerated at Robben Island prison and then later moved to Pollsmoor prison, during which time his reputation as a potent symbol of resistance to apartheid grew steadily. Released from prison in 1990, Mandela received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 and was inaugurated as the first democratically elected president of South Africa in 1994. He is the author of the international bestseller Long Walk to Freedom.
Hardcover: 480 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (October 11, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374128952
ISBN-13: 978-0374128951
Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #7 in Books
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