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Seasons of Her Life

A Biography of Madeleine Korbel Albright

LIST PRICE $17.99

About The Book

When Madeleine Korbel Albright was sworn in as secretary of state in January 1997, she made headlines around the world. She was the first woman to rise to the top tier of American government and had a reputation for defining foreign policy in blunt one-liners that voters could understand. When her Jewish heritage was disclosed, people were intrigued by her personal story and wondered how it was possible -- if it were possible -- that she truly could have been ignorant of her past.
Veteran Time magazine correspondent Ann Blackman has written the first comprehensive biography of Madeleine Albright. The book reveals a life of enormous texture -- a lonely, peripatetic childhood in war-ravaged Europe; two harrowing escapes from her homeland, once from the Nazis, then from the Communists; her arrival in America; Madeleine's unhappiness as a teenager in Denver, always the outsider, the little refugee; her marriage into an old American newspaper family with great wealth.
When, after twenty-three years, the marriage failed, Albright was devastated. But in many ways, divorce liberated her to pursue a lifelong interest in government and international affairs. From Senator Edmund S. Muskie's office to President Carter's White House to a professorship at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, Albright gained experience and contacts. As a foreign affairs advisor to Democratic vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro and, later, presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, Albright positioned herself to return to government as President Clinton's ambassador to the United Nations and eventually to claim her ultimate prize -- the office of secretary of state.
With both insight and compassion, Blackman shows how the changing cultural mores of the last four decades affected Albright and other women of her generation: the self-doubt she experienced when, as a young mother in an era when real mothers didn't work, she decided to take a job on Capitol Hill; the problems she faced as a female professor who was not always taken seriously in the white man's world of foreign policy; the psychological transformation from spending most of her professional life as a staffer who wrote talking points for others to becoming a woman of consequence in her own right; the ups and downs of an ambitious, driven woman who still carries her share of insecurities, now concealed by a veneer of power and celebrity.
In writing this landmark book, Blackman drew on archival material in the United States, Britain, and the Czech Republic, as well as interviews with almost two hundred friends and colleagues of Albright and her family, including President Clinton, Czech Republic President Václav Havel, and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, She also spent many hours with Albright herself who, feet up in her Georgetown living room, offered startlingly frank and poignant comments on her life, past and present. The book is enhanced with twenty-five photos, many from the Secretary's personal collection.

About The Author

Product Details

  • Publisher: Scribner (July 14, 1999)
  • Length: 400 pages
  • ISBN13: 9780684864310

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Raves and Reviews

Doris Kearns Goodwin Author of the 1995 Pulitzer Prize-winning No Ordinary Time In this absorbing tale of a remarkable woman, from her beginnings in Prague through years of struggle and abandonment to her triumphant appointment as the first female secretary of state, Ann Blackman has produced an absolutely first-rate biography which will be the essential foundation for all future works on Madeleine Albright. Deeply researched, yet written with ease and grace, Seasons of Her Life is rich with acute insight and vivid portraits.

Lesley Stahl 60 Minutes Ann Blackman's biography of Madeleine Albright -- the highest-ranking woman in government in our history -- is lively, insightful, filled with the fruits of serious digging, packed with drama, controversial, fair, and balanced. Above all, it's an impeccably told intimate story of a great woman's life, a book worthy of its subject.

Marvin Kalb Director of the Shorenstein Center on Press and Politics, Harvard University Bravo to Ann Blackman. She has penned a fascinating and important biography of the most powerful woman in American diplomacy. Elegantly written, exhaustively researched, crammed with new and intriguing insights, Seasons of Her Life is a must read. It is much more the story of a woman who's made it -- and how she did it -- than it is a handbook on negotiations and Foggy Bottom politics.

Ellen Goodman Pulitzer Prize-winning Columnist for the Boston Globe This is a compelling look at the life story of an extraordinary woman. In Seasons of Her Life, Ann Blackman deftly braids together the personal and the political, the private and the public. It's a gem of thorough and thoughtful reporting on the woman and the secretary of state.

Judy Woodruff CNN News This is one of those rare biographies that is a great read! Ann Blackman manages to combine deep research and insightful reporting with her talent for beautiful writing, and the result is enormously satisfying. You already know Madeleine Albright is a fascinating figure; you learn just how fascinating when you read this book.

Michael Beschloss Author of The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Krushchev, 1960-1963 Ann Blackman has brought us a fascinating, brisk, well-researched, and knowing exploration of a formidable secretary of state.

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