Madeleine Albright: A Twentieth-Century Odyssey - Softcover

Dobbs, Michael

3.73

60 ratings by Goodreads

9780805056600: Madeleine Albright: A Twentieth-Century Odyssey

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0805056602 ISBN 13: 9780805056600

Publisher: Holt Paperbacks, 2000

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Since becoming secretary of state in 1997, Madeleine Albright has emerged as one of the most forceful voices in the Clinton administration and the chief architect of American foreign policy in the Balkans. As Michael Dobbs makes clear in this timely and important book, it's impossible to understand Albright without an appreciation of the tumultuous events that have shaped her life, and he traces Albright's progress from a European ghetto to the corridors of power in Washington. As the twentieth century comes to a close, the life of this remarkable woman provides much insight into past events and is an inspirational testimony to how willpower and persistence can triumph over every adversity.

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Review:

This compelling, well-reported biography tells the story of Madeleine Albright, the first woman secretary of state--therefore the highest-ranking female official--in U.S. history. Its author, Michael Dobbs, was the Washington Post reporter who first uncovered Albright's Jewish heritage, which had been kept from her by her Czech immigrant parents, who fled to the U.S. when Madeleine was 11 years old. Her father, Joseph Korbel, was a diplomat serving in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, when World War II began. The Korbels managed to escape to England, but more than two dozen of her relatives (including three grandparents) died at the hands of the Nazis. Madeleine and her family were baptized as Catholics in England, and her parents never told her about her Jewish heritage or the circumstances of her grandparents' deaths.

Most of the book deals with Madeleine's life in the United States and the building of her career: member of the Wellesley College class of '59; marriage and then divorce from Joseph Medill Patterson Albright; her Ph.D. from Columbia, followed by jobs with Ed Muskie's senate office and Zbigniew Brzezinski at the National Security Council; the national campaigns of Geraldine Ferraro and Michael Dukakis; the 1993 appointment as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. "Madeleine was attracted to power as a swan is attracted to water," writes Dobbs. Her house in Georgetown, only a few blocks from the residences of Katherine Graham and Pamela Harriman, became a foreign-policy salon.

Albright has more star power than any secretary of state since Henry Kissinger, and she can take credit for increasing public interest and awareness of foreign affairs. Her personality is a "contradictory mix of insecurity and assertiveness, vulnerability and determination, pleasantness and steeliness," Dobbs writes. "Madeleine's life may have been a 'fairy tale,' in her phrase, but it was a fairy tale of her own making." At the heart of his assessment of her life is the secret of her family's past and how it drove her need for success as well as her views on foreign policy. Albright herself admits the seminal event affecting all of her views about foreign policy was the West's initial appeasement of Hitler and his takeover of her native Prague. "I saw," she once said, "what happened when a dictator was allowed to take over a piece of a country and the country went down the tubes. And I saw the opposite during the war when America joined the fight." Such feelings are essential background in understanding Albright's role in shaping American policy toward foreign intervention, particulary in Eastern Europe. --Linda Killian

About the Author:

Michael Dobbs was Washington Post bureau chief in Moscow from 1988 to 1993 and covered the State Department through 1997. He returned to the staff of the Post in 1998. He is the author of Down with Big Brother: The Fall of the Soviet Empire.

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