One of the most extraordinary political tales of the twentieth century, in which a nation stepped through the looking glass and emerged as the mirror image of its former self. The peaceful birth of black majority rule in South Africa was a transcendent moment. Many South Africans believe this negotiated revolution to be a miracle; at the very least it was a feat of political magic. One false step along the way could have ignited the race war that had been widely predicted as South Africa's destiny. Patti Waldmeir's colorful and incisive narrative begins in 1985, with Nelson Mandela in a prison hospital receiving clandestine visits from a white government minister. It ends nearly ten years later with the inauguration of the world's most famous prisoner as president of a new country. The author was present at nearly every critical event in this decade, and we see all the principal actorsMandela, F. W. de Klerk, Chief Buthelezi, and the militants of the extreme rightthrough the eyes of a journalist who knows them all personally. She captures the good sense and the violence of these times, and she illuminates the forces of history, economics, demographics, and morality that shaped the human drama. Few journalists have known South Africa so long or so well as Patti Waldmeir. This book draws on her eyewitness accounts of township violence, of conversations with presidents past and present, of guerrilla actions, and of brutal "necklaces." She reports from inside a political process without precedent, in which blacks and whites achieved their mutual liberation. Read Less