"Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand history – and then go out and change it." –President Barack Obama Nelson Mandela was one of the great moral and political leaders of his time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight against racial oppression in South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize and the presidency of his country. After his triumphant release in 1990 from more than a quarter-century of imprisonment, Mandela was at the center of the most compelling and inspiring political drama in the world. As president of the African National Congress and head of South Africa's antiapartheid movement, he was instrumental in moving the nation toward multiracial government and majority rule. He is still revered everywhere as a vital force in the fight for human rights and racial equality. Long Walk to Freedom is his moving and exhilarating autobiography, destined to take its place among the finest memoirs of history's greatest figures. Here for the first time, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela told the extraordinary story of his life -- an epic of struggle, setback, renewed hope, and ultimate triumph. The book that inspired the major motion picture Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom.

"My life in rural NSW last century, and comparisons with life to-day."--Provided by publisher.

Michael Foreman woke up when an incendiary bomb dropped through the roof of his Lowestoft home. Luckily, it missed his bed by inches, bounced off the floor and exploded up the chimney. So begins Michael's fascinating, brilliantly illustrated tale of growing up on the Suffolk frontline during World War II. He tells how he and his friends and family coped with bombing raids and deadly doodlebugs, how gas masks were great for making rude noises, and how nothing could beat rabbit pie! ' ... vivid, humorous and touching' Guardian.

This illustrated study shows how frontier life shaped children's character.

A memoir of life on a backwoods Virginia farm in the first half of the 20th century. Virginia Bell Dabney recalls the hardships of the Depression, the fire that destroyed her home and how her mother struggled to make a life for her family, but also finds much to rejoice in her country childhood.

'As a child I would sit on the stone wall as if hypnotised, imagining that the world ended where the moutains and the sky met and wishing I could stand at the top and touch the heavens.' This enchanting story tells of a young girl's magical childhood on a farm in the west of Ireland during the 1930s and 1940s. It looks at the mountain-village community, one that was poor, though never short of the necessities of life.

Demonstrates the diversity of the African continent by describing daily life in some of its fifty-three nations.