Mahatma Gandhi By Joseph Lelyveld Summary

Joseph Lelyveld was born on April 5th, 1937. He graduated from Harvard College in 1958, received a Master’s degree from the Columbia School of Journalism in 1960, and received a Fulbright Scholarship. In 1962, he was first hired as a copy editor, but soon became a foreign correspondent for the New York Times. He became the executive editor in 1994 and retired in 2001, after nearly 40 years of working for the Times. Joseph Lelyveld is also a reviewer for the New York Review of Books. His own works include House of Bondage: A South African Black Man Exposes in His Own Pictures and Words the Bitter Life of His Homeland Today, and Omaha Blues: A Memory Loop. Lelyveld received the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction in 1986 for Move Your Shadow: South Africa, Black and White, a book based on his reporting in the 1960’s and 1980’s from Johannesburg, South Africa.

Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India, is a novel about Mahatma Gandhi, which is the father of the Indian independence movement. He dedicated 20 years of his life fighting discrimination in South Africa. It was there that he created his concept of satyagraha, a non-violent way of protesting against discrimination. The word satyagraha derives from Sanskrit words “satya” meaning truth

I enjoyed reading the book, but there were a lot of times where I had to look up a word, because the author writes in a very sophisticated and complex language. Personally, I was intrigued by Mahatma Gandhi and found Lelyveld’s biography very informative and resourceful. If you are the kind of person that likes to see the good in people, this is a book for you. After finishing the book, I felt as if though I knew everything there is to know about Gandhi. Unfortunately, I was disappointed by the fact that the author decided to focus on the heroic side of Gandhi and forgot to mention all the horrible things he’s