Madam Secretary: A Memoir

Madeleine Albright is one of the most admired women of our era and the rst in American history to serve as Secretary of State. For eight years, during Bill Clinton's two presidential terms, she was a decision-maker and inside observer of the most dramatic episodes of recent years-from NATO's decision to halt ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, to the pursuit of peace in the Middle East. Now, in an outspoken memoir, she shares her story and provides a ringside view of world affairs during a period of unprecedented turbulence. Albright's story begins with her childhood as a Czechoslovak refugee, whose family fled rst Hitler and then the Communists. In America, Albright grew up to be a passionate advocate of civil and women's rights and followed a zigzag path to a career that ultimately placed her in the upper stratosphere of diplomacy and policy-making in her adopted country. Refreshingly candid, Madam Secretary brings to life the world leaders Albright dealt with intimately in her years of service and the battles she fought to prove her worth in a male-dominated arena. There are colorful portraits of such leading American gures as Bill and Hillary Clinton, Colin Powell, Jesse Helms, and of a host of fascinating foreign ofcials-Vaclav Havel, Yasser Arafat, Ariel Sharon, Benjamin Netanyahu, King Hussein, Vladimir Putin, Slobodan Milosevic, and North Korea's mysterious Kim Jong-Il. Besides these many encounters with the famous and powerful, we get to know Albright the private woman: her life raising three daughters, the painful breakup of her marriage to the scion of one of America's leading newspaper families, and the discovery late in life of her own Jewish ancestry and that her grandparents had died in concentration camps. Madam Secretary is sure to be one of the signature books of the early years of the twenty-rst century-a tapestry both intimate and panoramic, personal and public, a rich memoir destined to become a classic.