Seasons of Her Life

November 2, 1998
In the first biography of America's only female secretary of state, Blackman (Washington reporter for Time magazine) not only tells the life of a Czech refugee who becomes the highest-ranking woman in the U.S. government, but also weaves together three distinct subjects: the turbulent history of Czechoslovakia, the effect of the feminist movement on women of Albright's generation and the foreign policy process in the Carter and Clinton administrations. The daughter of a Czech diplomat, young Madeleine twice fled her native Prague, after the German invasion of 1939 and the Communist coup of 1948. Albright quickly adjusted to her new home in the U.S., graduating from Wellesley in 1959 and marrying publishing heir Joseph Albright. A wife and mother, Albright was also an academic and a "Washington lady," serving on boards and hosting dinner parties. After she made a name for herself as the U.S.'s plainspoken, media-savvy ambassador to the UN, Clinton appointed her as secretary of state. If her historic appointment was marred by the controversy over the revelation of her family's Jewish origin--a subject thoroughly vetted by Blackman--she remains one of the most compelling figures in the Clinton administration. Albright herself gave one interview to the author, while many of her friends and associates cooperated as well. Blackman is a skillful reporter who has written a solid, balanced biography. Her subject emerges as strong and determined, if somewhat obsessed with her public image.

July 1, 1998
From a Time magazine reporter who has covered six administrations.

October 15, 1998
If her predecessor, Warren Christopher, was a consummate insider, Albright--born in Czechoslovakia, a woman in a world of WASPish men--is an outsider who has, after years of hard work, come inside. "Time" reporter Blackman tells Albright's story in four periods: childhood in Europe (Czechoslovakia, escape to England from the Nazis, then back to her homeland); the 35 years from the Korbel family's defection and move to the U.S. (1948) through college, marriage, children, and graduate studies to her 1983 divorce from reporter Joe Albright, an heir to the Joseph Medill Patterson newspaper fortune; the period in the '80s and early '90s that Albright spent teaching at Georgetown and giving foreign policy advice to Democratic candidates; and the period at the United Nations and State Department. Blackman treats the 1997 "bombshell" --Albright's discovery that her family, which had raised her as a Roman Catholic, was Jewish and had lost close relatives in the Holocaust--credibly. An effective biography of a notable figure on the national and international scene. ((Reviewed October 15, 1998))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1998, American Library Association.)