Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India

Geoffrey C. WardGreat Soul concentrates on what [Lelyveld] calls Gandhi's "evolving sense of his constituency and social vision," and his subsequent struggle to impose that vision on an India at once "worshipful and obdurate"…He brings to his subject a reporter's healthy skepticism and an old India hand's stubborn fascination with the subcontinent and its people. This is not a full-scale biography. Nor is it for beginners. Lelyveld assumes his readers are familiar with the basic outlines of Gandhi's life…But Great Soul is a noteworthy book…vivid, nuanced and cleareyed.
—The New York Times Book Review




Hari KunzruTo American readers who may know only the basic outlines of his life, Great Soul will come as a revelation…the book scrupulously avoids sensationalism, which is for the best, given that even readers in India, more familiar with the idea of Gandhi as a complex figure, will still find the portrait of a troubled, changeable, wily and occasionally egotistical politician challenging…Mr.