BuzzFlash Reviews

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS

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From the Publisher, Simon & Schuster:

"This is the story of President Jimmy Carter's post-presidency, the most admired and productive in the nation's history. Through The Carter Center, which he and Rosalynn Carter founded in 1982, he has fought neglected diseases, waged peace in war zones, and built hope among some of the most forgotten and needy people in the world.

Serving in more than seventy nations, Carter has led peacekeeping efforts for Ethiopia, North Korea, Haiti, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Uganda, and Sudan. With his colleagues from The Carter Center, he has monitored more than sixty-five elections in troubled nations, from Palestine to Indonesia.

Carter's bold initiatives, undertaken with dedicated colleagues, have eliminated, prevented, or cured an array of diseases that have been characterized as "neglected" by the World Health Organization and that afflict tens of millions of people unnecessarily. The Carter Center has taught millions of African families how to increase the production of food grains, and Rosalynn Carter has led a vigorous war against the stigma of mental illness around the world.

"Immersing ourselves among these deprived and suffering people has been a great blessing as it stretched our minds and hearts," Jimmy Carter writes. "The principles of The Carter Center have been the same ones that should characterize our nation, or any individual. They are the beliefs inherent in all the great world religions, including commitments to peace, justice, freedom, humility, forgiveness or an attempt to find accommodation with potential foes, generosity, human rights or fair treatment of others, protection of the environment, and the alleviation of suffering. This is our agenda for the future."

Jimmy Carter, a man of integrity and conviction. He was our first modern "born again" president, but he took the words of Christ to heart, rather than using religion to bootstrap political ambition and dreams of empire.


Chapters in "Beyond the White House":

1. The Early Days
2. Waging Peace
3. Strengthening Democracy
4. Fighting Disease
5. Building Hope
6. The Next Twenty-five Years


Excerpt from the Kirkus Reviews:

The former president surveys 25 years of global good works, both political and humanitarian. After leaving the White House, Carter (Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis, 2005, etc.) wished to create a nonpartisan agency dedicated to action in the service of peace, freedom, democracy, human rights, environmental quality, nuclear-arms control and the alleviation of suffering from disease.

So was born the Carter Center, an institution designed to be subtle and respectful of cultural byways, knowledgeable and sophisticated regarding the complexity of intervening in international affairs, admonitory when necessary, unbending in its core values. In a series of stories, he describes the Center's work and the specific ways in which it's carried out.

These tales provide a ground-level view of the action, much of it edge-of-the-seat and not a little dangerous. Carter rekindled the Camp David Accords when he felt the Reagan administration was dragging its feet. He also tweaked the State Department's nose by traveling to North Korea to discuss nuclear armament and he castigates President Bush for deriding peace efforts with that country. He is diplomacy in motion, a come-let-us-reason-together guy, and he has been successful by any measure: averting an invasion of Haiti and calling foul in unfair elections, among other stellar moments.

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS