Jezreel low biography of mahatma

A few months before his death in 1948, Mahatma Gandhi remarked that men like him must be measured “not by the rare moments of greatness in their lives, but by the amount of dust they collect in the course of life’s journey.” Few of the hundreds of Gandhi’s biographers have followed this dictum, choosing instead the safe comfort of hagiography.

Pulitzer Prize winner Joseph Lelyveld ’60JRN, former executive editor of the New York Times, puts the record of Gandhi’s life to Gandhi’s test. The result, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India, is a hard-edged, grainy, but cogently persuasive biography of one of the most illustrious figures of the 20th century.

The subtitle reveals Lelyveld’s key idea: Alongside his well-known political struggle for India against British colonial rule, Gandhi carried out an even more determined struggle with the country of his birth, or at least with all of those things he believed were wrong with