Beyond the White House
Waging Peace, Fighting Disease, Building Hope
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- $3.99
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- $3.99
Publisher Description
The president’s personal and passionate account of his twenty-five years in the service of humanitarian effort that won him the Nobel Peace Prize was received with the admiring respect of reviewers and readers and it will stand as the record of his brilliant post-presidential career.
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.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Less a memoir than an extended brochure for his nonprofit institution, the Carter Center, President Carter's latest book ruminates on his work since leaving the Oval Office. With major programs in election monitoring, conflict negotiation and disease prevention and eradication, the center has been active in nearly 100 nations since its 1984 inception. Carter structures this book as a series of vignettes detailing his involvement with a specific nation or issue, from Haiti to schistosomiasis. While he does not hesitate to criticize American policy, those hoping for extensive political analysis will be disappointed. Some of the chapters provide useful insight into international development practices and high-level diplomatic negotiation, and Carter presents a compelling rebuttal to criticisms of his hobnobbing with dictators and totalitarians. Sharing the 39th president's boundless energy and enthusiasm for humanitarian work, the book is written in a highly personal and informal style: Carter exults in having convinced his Chinese minders to allow him and Rosalynn to bike freely around 1981 Beijing, and fumes with indignation upon being subjected to tobacco advertising on a flight home from the Balkans. Ultimately, though, this book doesn't measure up to his bestsellers of recent years.