Publisher : Random House Audio
Publication Date : 2010 03 30
>> Hats off to Mandela and to to the writer as well
What might seem a simple task that of distilling 15 principles a famous leader uses or has used either implicitly or explicitly in his attempt to heal the world is expertly rendered by Richard Stengel although the fact that he is also the author of Mandela s biography certainly helped Stengel seems to know Mandela as well as anyone excluding of course Mandela himself and the writing is clear fluid and with the precise level of discourse to communicate the beliefs action and perhaps most difficult the style of his subject What makes the task particularly challenging is that Stengel shows Mandela to be a complex man with a personality woven together through incredibly disparate strands a mentee of African Kings a student of British education a natural logician honed by the experience of legal studies and lawyering a figurative and literal political rebel and of course a political prisoner for 27 years
Stengel uses biographical summary anecdote direct quotations interviews with Mandela and others who know him or knew him to focus on the lessons on life love and courage The author is also wise enough to understand that expository prose is not necessarily competent to describe the essence of this complexity and uses a very apt quote from Whitman to summarize Mandala s character Do I contracdict myself /Very well then I contradict myself I am large I contain multitudes Fortunately for the world it seems Mandela s mulitudes were in the service of a specific goal equality and the rest was and has been strategy And one thing is evident from reading these lessons Mandala learned to be a master of strategy
One could even say that every moment of his public life was in service of this goal and considering the obstacles he faced in transforming South Africa he was the right man at the right time an almost preternatural alignment of what a society and a world needed and the person who possessed the character to fulfill the need
I don t know whether the author or subject of the book knows Orwell s line It is the job of a man not to be a saint but Mandela seems to have this engrained in his being The difference perhaps between the complexities of Mandala and the complexity of many others is that they all seem to have operated in an extremely unified fashion so for example he could hide fear when needed compliment adversaries to make them less adversarial help others to reach brilliant conclusions so that they would think that they reached them on their own or act humbly to defuse the overly aggrandizing
This is no goofy management tome or guide for the seekers of spirituality It s not a feel good book how to book or instruction book Stengel presents Mandela s Way to the reader to consider If the result is that the reader ponders or meditates upon these lessons that is sufficient This style seems also reminiscent of Orwell who knew that being didactic is the worst way to win someone over to your cause or way of thinking
It takes years to become a martial arts expert so if you become a Mandela yes man or no man right off the bat you will have lost the point of the book and you will be poorer for it Believe me this is something you will not want to miss As for the specifics read the book
Proviso I d add that the author makes a brief observation that Obama has some of Mandela s virtues Whether or not you like Obama I would take this premature comparison as an author s overenthusiasm something that Mandela himself would never fall prey to
>> A Transformed Man Who Transformed a Country
There are 15 short chapters referred to as lessons in Richard Stengel s new book Mandela s Way Fifteen Lessons on Life Love and Courage I confess that after reading the first four of them Courage is Not the Absence of Fear Be Measured Lead from the Front and Lead from the Back I felt that I had the idea and was very close to putting the book down The themes seemed clear and were already striking me as unnecessarily redundant Mandela is a truly remarkable person one who has lived at least three lives One before his 27 years as a prisoner of the Apartheid regime in his native South Africa the second while actually in prison and the third since his release He has changed through each and has become the patient calm man whose vision is always the long view as opposed to what he regards as the less than useful short view that he had when he was younger
I decided to finish the book anyway At 239 short pages it seemed a small investment to see if there was still more to learn about him
Stengel got very close to Nelson Mandela For an extended period he was by his side nearly constantly and had many many more conversations that Mandela had originally agreed to Clearly the picture developed by Stengel became as important to the subject as it was to the author The unusualness of the man is clear and while few others could be expected to arrive at his style way of thinking and manner of approaching friends and enemies alike one comes away from this brief but important book with the sense that it is in the end unusual people with unusual ways who achieve unusual and in this instance unlikely things
Viewed as a traitor by some former comrades Mandela managed to shape a new reality in South Africa by doing things thought impossible Speaking with old and viscous enemies like de Klerk discouraging active violence which he had come to espouse at an earlier time listening with observable respect to everyone even to those he knew in his heart were wrong These qualities became possible as functions not just of having led two previous lives but from having learned things he found useful from each of them
Conventional wisdom suggests that we learn from experience Nelson Mandela as he is captured here by Richard Stengel is a man who has demonstrated that experience does not in and of itself teach anything Rather experience presents us with an opportunity for learning
No two people experiencing the same thing might come away having learned the same things from it Nelson Mandela learned new ways to think and reason and new ways to facilitate change by taking on a seemingly trans human calm and long view Given the same circumstances another man might have become more visibly angry It is not that Mandela was not made angry but learned to not show it He learned the value of self control and even of acting as a necessary means toward a valuable end
The current nation of South Africa as imperfect at least as every nation is is a far better place that it would have been without the ministrations of this ever changed man
Occasionally redundant as it may be this revealing and worshipful tome is well worth a read by anyone interested in the specific man the specific country or in the process of human change and development
>> Mandela s Way Fifteen Lessons on Life Love and Courage Richard Stengel start a garden and share the fruits of your labor
Richard Stengel worked with Nelson Mandela on his memoir I read Stengel s new book Mandela s Way over a period of one week but it is enjoyable enough to finish in one sitting
There are certain inalienable rights everyone is entitled to
Mandela is their champion
Where there is life there is hope
Mandela is testimony you never stop growing
