Mandela's Way: Lessons on Life, Love, and Courage [Hardcover]

Richard Stengel (Author), Nelson Mandela (Preface)

Book Description

Release date: March 30, 2010

A compact, profoundly inspiring book that captures the spirit of Nelson Mandela, distilling the South African leader’s wisdom into 15 vital life lessons

We long for heroes and have too few. Nelson Mandela, who recently celebrated his ninety-fourth 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 fulfilling remarriage at the age of eighty.

This uplifting book 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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

After spending two years with Nelson Mandela collaborating on his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, author and Time managing editor Stengel (You're Too Kind) felt that leaving Mandela's side "was like the sun going out of my life." In 15 compelling chapters, Stengel uses his inside perspective and more than 70 hours of taped interviews to distill wisdom from "the grandfather of South Africa," who recently turned 91, while also recounting stories from Mandela's childhood, his days as a revolutionary, his 27-year imprisonment, and his time negotiating for the country's first democratic elections. Stengel also explores Mandela's romantic relationships, including his three wives (the latest of whom, Graca Machel, he married at age 80). It's the intersection of Mandela's personal life with his part in world history that makes this portrait so vivid and compelling; indeed, the personal role he's played in Stengel's life (it was Mandela who urged Stengel to marry his wife; he became godfather to Stengel's first son) lend the volume's self-help aspects real resonance. Peeling back the many layers of Mandela's life, Stengel provides a clear view of Mandela's legacy and the lessons he has to teach.
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Review

“There is no man I admire more than Nelson Mandela. Rick Sten­gel’s wise and moving book captures the Nelson Mandela I have been privileged to know. But reading Mandela’s Way gave me new insights and inspiration. I am confident it will give the same gifts to others. I was inspired anew, and I know others will be too.”—President Bill Clinton
 
“This delightfully inspiring book is a philosophical guide to how we can aspire to achieve Mandela’s grace and how we can draw upon his great­ness as a model for the comportment of our lives each day.”—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University
 
“Nelson Mandela has lived every word of his teaching, whatever the cost. His abiding lesson is about forgiveness. Mandela’s Way takes us into the inner life of one of the most of important heroes of the century. There are lessons here that could radically change the way you live your life.”—Deepak Chopra, author of The Ultimate Happiness Prescription
 
“Mandela’s Way is a timely and welcome reminder of this great man’s political genius, personal integrity, and peerless instinct for survival and triumph. Every world leader should keep Mandela’s Way within easy reach.”—Tom Brokaw
 
“Here is the wisdom of the world’s greatest moral leader brilliantly distilled by a wonderful writer. From the time they spent working closely together on Mandela’s memoirs, Rick Stengel draws fifteen big life lessons plus hundreds of smaller insights, while also giving us an intimate and astonishingly honest look at this inspiring human being.”—Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs and Einstein
 
“Mandela’s Way is an electrically exciting, direct, and vivid way of making greatness tangible, human and complex. Richard Stengel has honed all the elegance and lucidity of thirty years of brilliant cultural and political writing into a book to illuminate, to inspire—and to endure.”—Pico Iyer, author of The Open Road and The Lady and the Monk
 
 

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Crown Archetype; 1 edition (March 30, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307460681
• ISBN-13: 978-0307460684
• Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 1.1 x 7.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (60 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #114,913 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 36 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A Transformed Man Who Transformed a Country March 31, 2010

By D. Reinstein

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

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.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars What Would Nelson Mandela Do? March 23, 2010

By George P. Wood VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

What would Nelson Mandela do?

Toward the end of Mandela's Way, Richard Stengel asks this question. Stengel helped Mandela write his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, in the early 1990s, and this question helped him "internalize [Mandela] and his ideas." Mandela's Way is biographical, but with a moral point. How can reflecting on the life of Nelson Mandela help us live?

The tradition of biography as moral exercise is as old as the Greeks and Romans, not to mention Jews and Christians, but it has taken new form with the uniquely American literary genre of Leadership Secrets of X, usually some famous person. When I picked up Mandela's Way, I was hoping for the older form of the tradition but worried that I would get the newer one. Few things are more aggravating than the simplification of a person's life for the purpose of making the reader a better businessman. Stengel, thankfully, did not disappoint me.

As a college student in the late 80s and early 90s, I was aware of Mandela and the struggle of the African National Congress and others to end South African apartheid. I knew little about the man, however. Mandela's Way is an excellent introduction to his life and struggle, presented thematically rather than chronologically. If one metric of a book's quality is that it inspires you to read more on the subject, then this book is quite successful.

The subtitle of Stengel's book is Fifteen Lessons on Life, Love and Courage. My guess is that Stengel's publisher came up with this verbiage, as a nod to the newer form of moral biography. The lessons are simple--"Courage is not the absence of fear," "Lead from the front," "Lead from the back," etc.--without being simplistic. The way Stengel achieves this is by rooting each lesson in the context of Mandela's life, struggle, and self-reflection.

Prison dominates the narrative. Mandela spent three decades in South African prison. It molded him as a man and as a leader. It also cost him personally in many ways. Stengel takes measure of both the good and the bad in his portrait of Mandela's life. What emerges is a man who is morally tough, politically pragmatic--except on the all-important issue of a racially just South Africa, and personally resilient. Mandela's story inspired me.

"What would Nelson Mandela do?" reflects, whether consciously or not, a phrase popularized by American evangelicals: "What would Jesus do?" As a Christian and as a pastor, what strikes me is the absence of religion in Mandela's life. He is, according to Stengel, "a materialist in the philosophical sense." He believes that there is "no destiny that shapes our end; we shape it ourselves." Of course, he aligned with religious leaders such as Bishop Desmond Tutu, but without sharing their faith. And of course, the Afrikaner architects of apartheid were the progeny of the South African Reformed churches.

Which leads to this irony: Opponents of apartheid asked "What would Nelson Mandela do?" precisely because its proponents did not ask, or did not answer rightly, "What would Jesus do?

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Nice insight into Mandela, but few fresh life lessons here March 7, 2010

By TomWilly TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

This book provides great insight into Mandela the man. If this book was advertised as a biography, it would earn five stars. But it is advertised as a book of lessons we can apply to our own lives. In that regard it came up a bit short for me, introducing life lessons here and there and providing broad-sweeping examples of leadership and character, but rarely getting to those golden "a-ha" moments that readers value. Basically, it takes the same life lessons we have read about in many other books and wraps them around Mandela. So it is a must-read for any student or fan of Mr. Mandela, or if you just want to understand this great leader at a deeper level. In that area, it is very good and I enjoyed reading it. But as a book of life lessons, for me it was missing freshness and impact.