| Mandela's Way: Fifteen Lessons on Life, Love, and Courage |  | Author: Richard Stengel
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Category: eBooks
In Stock
Rating:  43 reviews
Sales Rank: 14,353
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Edition: 1
Pages: 256
Number Of Items: 1
Dewey Decimal Number: 650.1
Publication Date: March 18, 2010
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Product Description
We long for heroes and have too few. Nelson Mandela, who recently celebrated his ninety-first birthday, is the closest thing the world has to a secular saint. He liberated a country from a system of violent prejudice and helped unite oppressor and oppressed in a way that had never been done before.
Now Richard Stengel, the editor of Time magazine, has distilled countless hours of intimate conversation with Mandela into fifteen essential life lessons. For nearly three years, including the critical period when Mandela moved South Africa toward the first democratic elections in its history, Stengel collaborated with Mandela on his autobiography and traveled with him everywhere. Eating with him, watching him campaign, hearing him think out loud, Stengel came to know all the different sides of this complex man and became a cherished friend and colleague.
In Mandela’s Way, Stengel recounts the moments in which “the grandfather of South Africa” was tested and shares the wisdom he learned: why courage is more than the absence of fear, why we should keep our rivals close, why the answer is not always either/or but often “both,” how important it is for each of us to find something away from the world that gives us pleasure and satisfaction—our own garden. Woven into these life lessons are remarkable stories—of Mandela’s childhood as the protégé of a tribal king, of his early days as a freedom fighter, of the twenty-seven-year imprisonment that could not break him, and of his new and fulfilling marriage at the age of eighty.
This compact book is profoundly inspiring. It captures the spirit of this extraordinary man—warrior, martyr, husband, statesman, and moral leader—and spurs us to look within ourselves, reconsider the things we take for granted, and contemplate the legacy we’ll leave behind.
From the Hardcover edition.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 43
 Honest, balanced portrayal to great Man's life principles. August 27, 2010
Cool Guy
I picked up this not knowing much about Nelson Mandela after being suggested in the book of the week on a popular current affairs show on TV. The book turned out to be an amazing read, kind of what I was looking for, it mostly talks about Nelson Mandela's leadership qualities and how he picked them up besides some personal ones. The is a kind of a bridge between authors earlier work with Nelson Mandela while he did his autobiography and principles tactics that he follows to be a good leader. Most of it seems to come from notes, journals, interviews, interactions, time he spend with him over a few years on the autograph project. The world knows how a great leader, person Nelson Mandela is but what this book captures is that he's just like any other person with normal fears, aspirations, pressures, the books captures the principles he follows to keep him going through and succeed all with illustrated anecdotes from Mandela's life. Some of these lessons and good common sense values are very helpful can also applied to day to day life not just political leadership. The book is extremely simple in presentation most importantly honest, balanced with foibles in portrayal, easy to read. A must read for any body wanting to know Nelson Mandela's life principles he formatted during the course of his struggle to end apartheid and in turn become a leader in a very concise book.
 A handy distillation - but nothing new, by design August 19, 2010
Vincent Toolan (London United Kingdom)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Stengel, who helped Mandela with his autobiography, is quite frank in his introduction. This book distills a series of lessons from the awe-inspiring scope of Mandela's life. It serves as a kind of potted biography, summarising many key nuggets of experience. For those who've read Long Road to Freedom, it's like watching the trailer to a movie you've seen. The source material is so compelling, though, that it's worth going back to
A fascinating book about one of the most transformational leaders of our time August 15, 2010
Kathleen Dvorak Ashelford (West Coast, USA)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
"Nelson Mandela had many great teachers, but the greatest of them all was prison." Having grabbed the reader's attention with this sentence in the book's introduction, author Richard Stengel illustrates how Mandela's response to his circumstances during 27 years in prison enabled him to rise above them, to influence those around him, and ultimately to free him and transform his country.
Stengel, executive editor of Time magazine, and Mandela's official biographer, drew from his previous works on Mandela to assemble this short, engaging book of lessons on leadership, self-mastery, and intentional living from one of the most transformational leaders of our time.
"Mandela's Way" is not another biography. Stengel provides only enough information about Mandela as a young man to show the contrast between the 44-year-old who was sent to prison for life, and the 71-year-old who walked out of prison to transform South Africa and become its President. Oliver Tambo, the head of the African National Congress during Mandela's imprisonment, described the younger Mandela as "passionate, emotional, sensitive, quickly stung to bitterness and retaliation by insult and patronage." Although his tremendous, innate gifts and his upbringing in his tribe's royal court are factors in who Mandela became, he is, more than anything, a product of his own integrity - his character, self-discipline, and strong will.
When prodded to say how prison changed him, a reluctant Mandela answered tersely: "I became mature." The first thing Mandela learned in prison, Stengel says, is self-control. Rather than become bitter or defeated, he chose to learn from and then to shape circumstances for himself and his fellow prisoners, while never giving up his goal of overcoming Apartheid.
Not all the book is focused on Mandela's time in prison. Stengel describes what management books would call Mandela's "executive style." Although educated in Western management theory, Mandela rejects aspects of it that, in his view, do not work. Instead, he prefers the role model provided by the tribal chief who was his mentor, the African model best described as "ubuntu": each of us is human only in relation to others; people empower each other; and we become our best selves only through our unselfish interactions with each other. In the tribal culture of Mandela's upbringing, the chief sees himself as a servant whose office is both his calling and his privilege. This is hardly the philosophy behind most MBA curricula.
But the most instructive, interesting passages are those describing how Mandela spent his years of incarceration, especially when one considers he had little hope of ever getting out. He kept a daily exercise routine in his cell - running in place for 45 minutes followed by pushups and sit-ups. Even now, in his nineties, Mandela often walks for three or four hours, starting at 4:30 in the morning, his decades-younger bodyguards often struggling to keep up. In prison, his self-imposed academic curriculum encompassed literature ranging from Tolstoy to Shakespeare to Machiavelli. He became fluent in Afrikaans, the language of his enemies, and educated himself in its literature. He shocked his white prison guards with his ability to speak their tongue, earning their respect and, finally, their admiration. Anyone who has studied another language knows how difficult it is, even in the best circumstances. Mandela persisted because it enabled him to understand his enemies, including their humanity. This knowledge helped him become the Mandela who preaches forgiveness.
Stengel shows us that the man who suffered so much loss and injustice, who paid for his convictions with decades of his life and damage to family relationships, is by no means free from the pain. Yet he made a deliberate choice to forgive and to exhort fellow citizens, black and white, to do the same. His reasons are pragmatic: vindictiveness and bitterness imprison people in the past; forgiveness moves them forward. Unlike Desmond Tutu, Mahatma Gandhi, or Martin Luther King Jr., Mandela is not a man of faith. He is, the author says, a man of principle. One principle exactly: constitutional equality for all South Africa. Non-violence was the preferred approach, but dispensable if it got in the way. For years, I could not admire Mandela because of the horrible acts of violence to which the African National Congress resorted. In this book, I learned that Mandela hated violence, embraced it reluctantly for a time, but renounced it ultimately as unproductive.
I haven't read Stengel's biography, so I learned many things about Mandela that I didn't know before. This is a man who made many mistakes, squandered opportunities, and paid dearly. He still carries the pain that his mother never lived to see his success; at the time of her death, he was an apparent ne'er do well in trouble with the law. Yet his life shows there can be second chances for those committed to a vision.
When Stengel describes the way in which Mandela cultivated his prison vegetable garden over many years, I saw a metaphor for the way in which he prepared, planted, and cultivated the seeds of what became his negotiations with the South African government.
Mandela loved to garden. In the early 1970s, isolated from the rest of the world but for one letter and one visitor every six months, with everything in his world outside falling apart, Mandela decided to plant a garden. Obtaining the permission to do so took months of quiet, patient campaigning, and navigating the prison bureaucracy. Finally, he was allowed a small plot of dry, rocky soil, which, under the watch of guards, he was allowed to till using his hands. Over time, he acquired tools; friends and family sent him seeds. Fertilizer came from grinding bones he found from the many graves on the island. A few years later, he was supplying the kitchen with vegetables to supplement the prisoners' diet. Before long, he was giving bunches of vegetables to the prison guards for their families. Mandela collected and studied books on agriculture and acquired considerable expertise. Stengel said Mandela would sometimes talk using gardening metaphors, saying people could be cultivated like plants.
One can't help but see a parallel between Mandela's cultivation of his garden and the slow, controlled, process by which, over a period of years, he planned, and then initiated negotiations for peace with the South African government. As with the garden, it was a slow process, taking years of patience, recognizing the right moment, waiting for his adversary to respond, and then taking steps that flew in the face of the ANC's official position at that time, of absolute non-negotiation.
If there is one overarching lesson "Mandela's Way," it is this: we create ourselves through our choices, whatever our circumstances, whatever our past mistakes. It illustrates how Mandela chose deliberately to become who he is, and the world is more just and peaceful because of it. It is full of lessons for anyone interested in how people grow. It can be read in less than a couple of hours - and is so fascinating as to be worth reading many times over.
A precious and intimate look August 7, 2010
Robert A. Naseef (Philadelphia, PA USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a precious and intimate look at one of the transformational figures of our lifetime. Mandela's unique blend of humility, inner strength, confidence, and courage in the face of incredible suffering moves the reader and leaves you longing for more. I felt like I was getting to know this man and through him gaining in wisdom about our world and how it should and must be further changed and transformed.
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Mandela's Way Teaches Valuable Lessons July 15, 2010
Thomas D. Hinton (San Diego, California)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Richard Stengel has written a superb book on Nelson Mandela and captured both the essence and charm of a man who overcame racism and bitterness after 27 years in prison to lead South Africa through it's most repressive period. While Mandela's Way is a short book, it still offers readers an unusual glimpse into the heart, soul and political mind of Africa's greatest leader to date.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 43
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