A World Made New tells the dramatic story of the struggle to build, out of the trauma and wreckage of World War II, a document that would ensure it would never happen again. There was an almost religious intensity to the project, championed by Eleanor Roosevelt under the aegis of the newly formed United nations and brought into being by an extraordinary group of men and women who knew, like the framers of the Declaration of Independence, that they were making history. They worked against the clock, the brief window between the end of World War II and the deep freeze of the cold war, to forget the founding document of the modern rights movement.
A distinguished professor of international law, Mary Ann Glendon was given exclusive access to personal diaries and unpublished memoirs of key participants. An outstanding work of narrative history, A World Made New is the first book devoted to this crucial moment in Eleanor Roosevelt’s life and in world history.
‘For anyone interested in Eleanor Roosevelt or human rights, this book is a must. It shows ER ‘on her own,’ a pragmatic visionary leading the effort to create one of the twentieth century’s most important documents. An essential part of our history, almost lost, has been brilliantly recovered by Mary Ann Glendon. Her book belongs on the shelf of anyone who cares about human rights or the UN, and it makes clear why Eleanor Roosevelt considered the Universal Declaration her most important achievement.’
-Richard C. Holbrooke, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N.
