Knowing Mandela: A Personal Portrait
*Starred Review* Carlin was the first foreign correspondent to interview Mandela as president. As South African correspondent for the London Independent, Carlin covered Mandela’s release from 27 years of imprisonment in 1990 and spent the next five years chronicling Mandela’s presidency. The two men last met in 2009 as Mandela’s health was failing. In this memoir, Carlin offers more than a news account of the presidency of an extraordinary world figure. He details the personal and political struggles of a man charged with holding together a fragile nation at the end of apartheid and coping with the heartbreak of his troubled marriage. Behind the scenes, Mandela was as gracious as he appeared in public, taking tea in the president’s chamber in contrast to the petty rules of apartheid, when he would have been restricted to drinking from a tin cup. Mandela set the right tone, coping with fearful whites, angry blacks, and a political party worried that he’d been co-opted after so many years in prison. Carlin portrays a 71-year-old man of stunning charisma, disarming journalists, detractors, former jailers, parliamentary opponents, and world figures from Bill Clinton to Queen Elizabeth. Written with obvious affection and admiration, this is a moving portrait of a philosophical and visionary man who was also pragmatic enough to know that anger and revenge would destroy South Africa. --Vanessa Bush