book
Mandela: The Authorized Biography
Sampson, Anthony. Mandela: The Authorized Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.
Why this matters here
Anthony Sampson’s Mandela: The Authorized Biography documents Nelson Mandela’s public posture during South Africa’s transition and how his international image was constructed. When Authority Is Misread uses that record against memory that treats reconciliation as Mandela’s inevitable nature rather than interpreted, delayed, and strategically held speech. Sampson supplies biography of posture and image; the book asks how publics misread authority when waiting preserves a reply that irreversible declaration would foreclose.
