GOLDA: Golda Meir: The Romantic Years

Martin, author of the bestselling Jennie, the story of Winston Churchill's mother, and A Hero For Our Time, a biography of John F. Kennedy, has now written a dramatic, exciting, page-turner biography of the early years of the colorful Israeli prime minister. Martin follows MeWs story from her impoverished childhood in the 1890's in Pinsk, Russia, to her Americanization in Milwaukee and her first years of independence in Denver, and on to Palestine in the 1940's. The author's vivid and well-researched account gives a strong sense of the origins of the legendary courage, strength, and political brilliance of this woman who was integral to the founding of the state of Israel. At the same time, it recounts her more ordinary personal difficulties--conflicts with parents who wanted her to be a more conventional woman and discouraged her pursuit of politics and intellectual growth; the failure of her marriage; the illness of her daughter. And Martin also captures the little known romantic side of this complex woman, limning MeWs many secret loves after the deterioration of her marriage. Her lovers, the political leaders of Zionism, were also her mentors and rivals, and so politics and romance were forever intertwined in her life. A highly readable, novelistic biography that enhances the historical figure of Meir by uncovering the romantic Meir--who emerges as an even more impressive woman who let nothing stand in the way of her dream of the state of Israel, and who was constantly embattled not only with the British and the Arabs but with the emotional wars in her love life. A potential big seller.