She was born Maria Jana Korbelova in Prague just before the outbreak of World War II, the first child of Czech Jewish parents. Almost sixty years later Madeleine Korbel Albright was sworn in as the United States secretary of state, the first woman to hold the position.

Her dramatic life and rise to power are the focus of this meticulously documented biography, which expands on the ground-breaking research by Michael Dobbs, the Washington Post reporter who, in 1997, first disclosed the incredible and, until then, lost history of Madeleine Albright's early life.

At the age of two Madeleine was saved from almost certain death when her family fled to England after Hitler's invasion of her native Czechoslovakia. More than two dozen of her close relatives died in Nazi concentration camps. After the war, deciding to protect themselves and their family from further persecution, Madeleine's parents kept silent about their Jewish roots and raised their children as Catholics.

In remarkable detail and with great sensitivity Dobbs pieces together the fascinating and poignant lives of several generations of Madeleine's ancestors, revealing a Jewish family's recurring quest for assimilation as they moved from an Eastern European ghetto to the corridors of power in Washington.