Books like Anwar Sadat by Joseph Finklestone

Contains primary source material.

"This book chronicles Ho's childhood as the son of a willfully poor and brilliant scholar. It follows Ho through his early years as an itinerant expatriate - forced to leave French Indochina to escape arrest, he shipped out as a cook on a passenger steamer and traveled the globe. It tells of his years in the heady environment of London and Paris during and after World War I, where he supported himself with a variety of jobs including sous-chef to the great Escoffier, all the while working tirelessly to push the anticolonialist cause among his comrades in international Communist circles.". "Duiker gives an account of Ho's rise to leadership of the Vietnamese Communist movement, his years of travel (often in disguise) fomenting revolution, his imprisonments and narrow escapes from the French Surete, and his phenomenal ability as the first president of his country to inspire and reconcile his often bitterly divided colleagues. Using files from Soviet and French archives, Duiker has also re-created Ho's ceaseless efforts to enlist Moscow, Beijing, and Washington in his cause, and his artful attempts to play the three off one another.". "By accessing original documents in five languages, Duiker has been able to shed new light on the question of Ho's primary motivation: Was he simply a patriot bent on achieving Vietnamese independence, or a chameleon who constructed a deceptive nationalist image solely to win support, at home and abroad, for global proletarian revolution?"--BOOK JACKET.

"The Life of Nelson Mandela is one of the most extraordinary epics of the twentieth century. An almost-forgotten prisoner on Robben Island twenty years ago, apparently doomed to a helpless existence as a victim of apartheid, he not only survived but almost single-handedly saved South Africa from potential chaos, to become one of the most widely admired leaders in the world. Mandela's myth is dazzling; in this biography Anthony Sampson penetrates it to show us the man himself."--BOOK JACKET. "Mandela is filled with new insights and information. We see how prison, which he and his fellow inmates turned into a kind of unofficial university, gradually transformed Mandela from a headstrong activist into a reflective and consummately skilled statesman. We learn how British and American diplomats cold-shouldered him when support was desperately needed, and about the political infighting, sometimes vicious, that went on between anti-apartheid factions. Particularly fascinating is Sampson's narrative of the incredible negotiations leading to Mandela's release from prison and the eventual collapse of the white regime, when his colleagues feared that he was selling out to the government."--BOOK JACKET. "At every turn, this book sheds fresh light on the moral dilemmas that Mandela was forced to face again and again in his personal and public lives. In the struggle for freedom for South African blacks, he paid a tragic price, becoming alienated from his wife and remote from his children. Yet he famously retained his humanity, and while Sampson does not conceal Mandela's failings - his stubbornness, his fixed loyalties, his princely manners and detachment - the man who emerges is authentically heroic."--BOOK JACKET.

"This book recounts the life and career of Raquel Liberman, a Polish Jewish prostitute and victim of the White Slave Trade, which brought women from Eastern Europe to Argentina from the late 1880s to the 1930s. This volume sheds light on the events leading up to a dramatic confrontation between Raquel Liberman and the Zwi Migdal, the largest Jewish prostitution organization of the early twentieth century. Liberman's struggle with the Zwi Migdal and her triumphant public victory over her oppressors was political cause celebre in its time. Nora Glickman's study is a new consideration of Liberman's historical significance, examining Liberman's recently released personal correspondence (translated textually from Yiddish) and details of Liberman's previously concealed private life."--BOOK JACKET.

Woodrow Wilson--scholar, reformer, orator, warrior, and peacemaker--was a visionary whose successes place him among the great presidents, and whose failures leave questions that still haunt the late twentieth century. A vigorous, attractive leader in his time, he has come down to posterity as a grim figure, yet he brought a fresh spirit to American politics as he took our nation irrevocably into the arena of international leadership. This is the first biography based on the full corpus of Wilson papers and letters, and covers his public and private life as well as portraying the politicians, statesmen and world leaders among whom he moved.--From publisher description.