In this thoughtful, balanced biography, former Los Angeles Times foreign and diplomatic correspondent Stanley Meisler traces Kofi Annan’s unconventional rise from optimistic student to striving personnel and budget specialist in the United Nations bureaucracy to full-time manager of the world’s crises. The book presents a unique portrait of this widely admired leader, with Annan’s own view of events tempered and augmented by those of his allies and opponents, defenders and detractors.
Stanley Meisler is the author of the biography Kofi Annan: A Man of Peace in a World of War, the history United Nations : The First Fifty Years and the upcoming history When The World Calls: The Inside Story Of The Peace Corps And Its First Fifty Years. Meisler served as a Los Angeles Times foreign and diplomatic correspondent for thirty years, assigned to Nairobi, Mexico City, Madrid, Toronto, Paris, Barcelona, the United Nations and Washington. He still contributes articles to the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Sunday Opinion and Art sections and writes a News Commentary for his website, www.stanleymeisler.com.
For many years, Meisler has contributed articles to leading American magazines including Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the Atlantic, The Nation, the Reader's Digest, the Quarterly Journal of Military History, and the Columbia Journalism Review. While most of these articles focus on foreign affairs and political issues, he also has contributed more than thirty articles on artists and art history to the Smithsonian Magazine.
From time to time, he has contributed chapters to various anthologies and textbooks. The latest is "The Massacre in El Mozote" in Thinking Clearly: Cases in Journalistic Decision-Making (Columbia University Press, 2003), edited by Tom Rosenstiel and Amy S. Mitchell.
Meisler has twice won the Korn-Ferry Award for Excellence in United Nations Reporting and is a recipient of the Ford Foundation Area Training Fellowship in African Studies. He conducted classes in international reporting at the Columbia University School of Journalism in 2003 and 2004.
He began his journalism career in 1953 as a reporter for The Middletown Ohio Journal and went on to work as a reporter with the Associated Press from 1954 to 1964. He was deputy director of the Office of Evaluation and Research of the U.S. Peace Corps in Washington before joining the Los Angeles Times in 1967.
Meisler received a B.A. in English Literature from the City College of New York in 1952 and undertook graduate studies in both English Literature and African Studies at the University of California in Berkeley.
Stanley Meisler is married to Elizabeth Fox, development communication expert and editor of the book Latin Politics, Global Media.
