Kofi Annan : A Man of Peace in a World of War

To be published to coincide with the end of Kofi Annan's tenure at the United Nations, this will be the first definitive biography, beginning with his boyhood in Ghana and charting his rise to world statesman as head of the U.N. The book traces his life from Ghana to a university education in Minnesota, to decades of anonymity as an international civil servant, to his sudden notoriety in the 1990s as chief of U.N. peacekeeping and then secretary-general. Although the author is an admirer of Annan, this is not an authorized biography and does not soft pedal the difficult issues like Annan's son's involvement in the oil-for-food scandal or Annan's role in the U.N.'s catastrophic failures to engage meaningfully in Rwanda, Bosnia, and East Timor, or his defiance of the United States decision to go to war in Iraq.

STANLEY MEISLER is the author of United Nations: The First Fifty Years, the only authoritative history of the U.N. He has known Kofi Annan for many years, having covered him during much of Annan's career as a public figure. For twenty years, Meisler covered much of the world for the Los Angeles Times, heading bureaus in Nairobi, Mexico City, Madrid, Toronto, and Paris. He then returned to the United States for a decade to cover the U.N. in New York and the State Department in Washington. Meisler still contributes articles to the paper's Book Review, Sunday Opinion, and Art sections. He has also contributed to Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the Atlantic, Reader's Digest, and numerous other periodicals.