An amazing long life well-lived will inspire coverage from multiple angles. A "Nelson Mandela" general keyword search in Sno-Isle's catalog brings up 69 entries, including a few additions I made this morning to 3M ebook holdings. While no politically meaningful career can escape controversy and criticism in life, upon his death Mandela seems to be receiving unanimous acclaim from left and right. Reading John Carlin's Invictus, the account of Mandela's use of the 1995 World Cup to rally the nation around the previously whites-only sport of rugby, I was struck with the astuteness of a man willing to learn the Afrikaans language and culture even of his jailers, co-opting enemies for the ultimate cause of justice and national unity. Let's hope his successors can maintain that legacy.
As luck would have it, we have also had a timely enhancement of our collection related to South Africa generally, thanks to the Nysether Family's annual grant. Publisher's Weekly, too, has a
nice list of books related to Mandela. I will reproduce a few titles here.
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Sampson, Anthony. Mandela: the Authorized Biography. Knopf, 1999.
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Mandela, Nelson. Conversations with Myself. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010.
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Invictus: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation. Penguin Press, 2008.
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