Farrar, Straus and Giroux announced today that President Barack Obama will write the foreword to a new book by Nelson Mandela, Conversations with Myself, due out in October.
According to the press release from FSG, the book will draw on “Journals kept on the run during the anti-apartheid struggle of the early 1960s; diaries and draft letters written in Robben Island Prison and other South African prisons during his twenty-seven years of incarceration; notebooks from the post-apartheid transition; private recorded conversations; speeches and correspondence written during his presidency.”
Madela’s unpublished diaries were the talk of the Stadt at the Frankfurt Book Fair last year, when FSG bought the U.S. rights. A foreword by the president only magnifies the anticipation. Mandela’s 1994 autobiography Long Walk to Freedom has sold 6 million copies worldwide. Obama hasn’t done too badly himself. Together, this book will be in every house in America.