Long Walk to Freedom

Nelson Mandela 1994

Devastation Rating

Ugly Crying
memoir apartheid South Africa politics

Our Take

Twenty-seven years of imprisonment, and Mandela writes about them with the equanimity of someone who understood that bitterness was a luxury he could not afford. The autobiography is also a document of a country's destruction and reconstruction. The final chapters, as power transfers, are the most cautiously hopeful pages in political memoir.

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