Kofi annan biography book

When Harvey Rice, president of Macalester College, introduced a young African student to his new classmates in 1959, he urged the Americans to get to know this young man, who was destined for a lifetime of great accomplishment and would be a world leader some day.

Despite the eerie accuracy of Rice's prediction, however, Kofi Annan's path to destiny was anything but direct.

In Kofi Annan: A Man of Peace in a World of War, former Los Angeles Times foreign and diplomatic correspondent Stanley Meisler traces Annan's very 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.

Drawing on personal interviews with Annan, as well as numerous friends, U.N.

colleagues, diplomats, and world leaders, Meisler examines Annan's entrance onto the world stage from his emergence as an astute and disarmingly frank negotiator during the lead-up to the first Gulf Wa