Customer Reviews

Madeleine Albright: A Twentieth-Century Odyssey

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

What a fabulous book! I couldn't put it down. Having read this book, I have a new appreciation for Madeleine Albright as a woman who raised her children and then started a career which took her to the top. Dobbs is deeply sensitive to this, and you get the feeling that even as she climbs the ladder to her ultimate success, she wonders whether she is up to the job that lies ahead. Don't we women all have this experience at one time or another, even as we stop what we are doing to raise our children? Dobbs seems to have presented Albright with the only family tree she has even seen. He found branches of her family she never knew existed. The tragedy which befell her family in the Holocaust is not in vain - at the end of a century which molded and shaped her family, she has found them all again. A riveting story and it's beautifully written - I highly recommend this book.

Dobbs has produced an amazing piece of research and journalism. Practically half the book is devoted to a meticulous charting of Madeleine's parents, the Korbels, and their narrow escape from the Holocaust and later the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia. Following them to America, Dobbs shows how Madeliene's drive and natural intelligence lead her to assimilate seamlessly into American culture and graduate from Wellesley College. I think the author also does an excellent job charting the conflicts for women of this period and demonstrates how Albright succeeds in constantly acquiring new skills and a network of influential friends and colleagues during a time when she could have been simply a "supportive housewife". His insider look at her political career in New York and Washington is fascinating and very informative.

Perhaps Dobbs deserves to be best congratulated on developing a three-dimensional picture of a complex woman - no saint but instead a powerful human figure in our time.

Madeleine Albright: A Twentieth Century Odyssey is a wonderful read. It is packed with new material about Madeleine Albright and insights into her life, beginning with a painfully vivid reconstruction of the deaths of many of her family members in the Holocaust. It shows how Albright has drawn on the drive and resourcefulness of her ancestors in Central Europe to make it to the top in America. The Blackman book, to which the previous reviewer refers, pales by comparison.

Dobbs has interviewed many more people than his competitor, and his research is much more thorough. If you only have time for one Albright book, make it this one!

This book is a model of biographic research. Dobbs tracks Albright's family 4 generations back across Europe and through WWII.

I greatly enjoyed learning more about Albright's personal rise to the top, which was inspirational to me as a woman.

But due to Albright's lack of cooperation with Dobbs in the project, it didn't have a lot of detail from her personally. It was almost all from friends, enemies? and others.

The facts around Dobbs writing this book bother me. It started with him digging up the fact that she was Jewish (Haven't we progressed beyond caring whether someone is Jewish?) After Dobbs discovered this fact and it broke in the news, he decided to write a book. He describes a tense meeting with Madeline in which she is not at all pleased with his intrusive findings.

This detail bothered me as I read the book. Is Doobs impartial? Was he possibly angry that she basically shunned his project? It undermined my faith in his opinions slightly.

If you want to learn more about Madeline and don't mind that the first part is pre WWII, you'll enjoy this book. But I think Dobbs could have gone about it in a better way. I would have enjoyed hearing what Madeline really had to say about everything.

This is a fascinating book which covers the Holocaust through one family's silence and nominal conversion to Catholicism to survive. Certainly it presents the Holocaust in a different light than usual. The tale of a refugee female's attainment of the post of Sec. of State is riveting. Even the analysis of Albright's divorce explains one of the tragedies of twentieth century life. The book is subtitled a twentieth-century odyssey and that is what it is. Read it!

Michael Dobbs is the journalist who broke the story of Madeleine Albright's Jewish roots: his new book on America's first female Secretary of State is fascinating and masterfully written - THE book on how a Czech refugee girl made it to become the most powerful woman in the U.S. government. Dobbs has done a great deal of legwork, uncovering a number of new and revealing facts about Albright's past and her role model father.

Based on his extensive research Dobbs now argues that Albright almost certainly knew she was from a Jewish family - many of whom perished in the Holocaust - well before she has said that she did. Like many immigrants from Europe, Joseph Korbel, her father, wanted to put a fire wall between the tragic past and his new identity in the West. He instilled that drive for a new identity in his ambitious daughter, Dobbs says, and it propelled her to the top.

In light of the current Kosovo situation, with Albanian refugees fleeing their homeland in a harkening back to WWII, this first-rate book is mandatory reading for anyone who wants to understand the mind set of the Secretary of State and why we are involved in Kosovo.

Madeleine is truly driven by the need to assimilate, succeed, and do something great with her life. Her life has not been ordinary. She was shaped by life altering experiences that many young Americans do not understand. In fact, some probably cannot even imagine the depth that Madeleine arose from. Her strength, vision, and tenacity have guided her to become one of the leading role models in our modern society. However, she's also become an icon to women who so desperately need female role models. She questioned whether she had the ability to succeed in a predominantly male world. Her doubts are echoed by women across the country. However, she also demonstrated that it was possible to achieve dreams despite overwhelming odds against success. The Odyssey is truly inspiring. The only reason I wouldn't rate this book as "5 stars" is because of the author's cold, calculated, intrusion into Madeleine's most private moments-such as finding out she was Jewish. Yes, Madeleine's past is what makes her story so remarkable. However, I found Dobbs to be only concerned with "breaking the story", and not necessarily caring how it hurt Madeleine and her family. He was looking for the scoop.

Madeleine Albright: A Twentieth Century Odyssey was a joy to read. It was well-written, in precise, easyily read prose. The research job was obviously fantastic, as Dobbs uncovered facts that even Madeleine was at least at one time unaware of. This history of Madeleine Albright's life is detailed and amazing. She is truly a person to be admired. Her history is laced unremovably with the history of the countries she lived in. Her native Czeckoslovkia underwent Hitler, the rise and fall of Communism, and later the dis-integration of the country into the Czeck Republic and Slovakia. Her political views were shaped by Munich and the appeasement, by the consequences of inaction rather than by the consequences of action, such as the Vietnam War, the one event which primarily shaped the foriegn-policy views of her colleagues. Her father delivered her and her immediate family from Hitler, as they were Jewish. Much of the rest of her family perished in the death camps. The Albrights moved to the United States and converted to Catholicism as a protective measure. Madeleine was drived by an incredible urge to assimilate, to please, and to succeed. Sometimes, these instincts came into conflict with one another. Dr. Albright is an amazing woman. I have seen her speak at a college in my area about terrorism and about the effects of September 11, and the myth of a bipolar world. She talked about women's rights and about the Balkans War. She said that "a country that lives only for itself is like a person that lives only fo himself." This defines her foreign policy image. I highly recommend this book, both for its research and for its subject matter.

Dobbs deserves credit for breaking the story of Albright's Jewish roots. but this book is little more than a collection of previously published stories that draws no new conclusions. I read another Albright biography, Seasons of Her Life, that was better written and contained lots of fresh material about this fascinating woman. I would recommend it over this Dobbs book without hesitation.

Grab a tissue and get ready for the first chapters of this wonderful book. Dobbs succeeds not only in conveying the confusion and pathos of Albright's early life, but also in giving readers a vivid, heart-rending view of one family's devastation as it confronted the Third Reich. The Korbel's (Madeleine's parents) narrowly escape death, rebuilding their life in America. The story of Madeleine's assimilation as an American and her marriage into one of the country's most powerful media families is nearly as riveting as her rise to professional power in Washington, D.C. Dobbs knows how to get the inside facts, tell a great story and give enough analysis to be insightful but not overbearing. The parts which deal with the revelation of Albright's Jewish heritage, and Dobbs' confrontation with Albright about her history, are fascinating. The additional intrigues around possible stolen art work turn parts of this great biography into a good mystery as well. Thank you to Michael Dobbs for being bold and fair in revealing the inside story of one of the most amazing women of our time.