GREAT SOUL(ISBN=) 英文原版

A highly original, stirring book on Mahatma Gandhi that deepens
our sense of his achievements and disappointments—his success in
seizing India’s imagination and shaping its independence struggle
as a mass movement, his recognition late in life that few of his
followers paid more than lip service to his ambitious goals of
social justice for the country’s minorities, outcasts, and rural
poor.
    Pulitzer Prize–winner Joseph Lelyveld shows in
vivid, unmatched detail how Gandhi’s sense of mission, social
values, and philosophy of nonviolent resistance were shaped on
another subcontinent—during two decades in South Africa—and then
tested by an India that quickly learned to revere him as a Mahatma,
or “Great Soul,” while following him only a small part of the way
to the social transformation he envisioned. The man himself emerges
as one of history’s most remarkable self-creations, a prosperous
lawyer who became an ascetic in a loincloth wholly dedicated to
political and social action. Lelyveld leads us step-by-step through
the heroic—and tragic—last months of this selfless leader’s long
campaign when his nonviolent efforts culminated in the partition of
India, the creation of Pakistan, and a bloodbath of ethnic
cleansing that ended only with his own assassination.
    India and its politicians were ready to place
Gandhi on a pedestal as “Father of the Nation” but were less
inclined to embrace his teachings. Muslim support, crucial in his
rise to leadership, soon waned, and the oppressed untouchables—for
whom Gandhi spoke to Hindus as a whole—produced their own
leaders.
    Here is a vital, brilliant reconsideration of
Gandhi’s extraordinary struggles on two continents, of his fierce
but, finally, unfulfilled hopes, and of his ever-evolving legacy,
which more than six decades after his death still ensures his place
as India’s social conscience—and not just India’s.

Joseph Lelyveld’s interest in Gandhi dates back
to tours in India and South Africa as a correspondent for The
New York Times, where he worked for nearly four decades, ending
up as executive editor from 1994 to 2001. His book on apartheid,
Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White, won the
Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. He is also the author of
Omaha Blues: A Memory Loop. He lives in New York.