List $29.95

Written by Karen DeYoung - Audio book narrated by Roscoe Orman - Abridged Nonfiction - 5 COMPACT DISCS - 6 hours

Publisher, Random House audio books (April 2006)

Listen to an MP3 audio clip.

Over the course of a lifetime of service to his country, Colin Powell became a national hero, a beacon of wise leadership and, according to polls, “the most trusted man in America.” From his humble origins as the son of Jamaican immigrants to the highest levels of government in four administrations, he helped guide the nation through some of its most heart-wrenching hours. Now, in the first full biography of one of the most admired men of our time, award-winning Washington Post journalist Karen DeYoung takes us from Powell’s Bronx childhood and meteoric rise through the military ranks to his formative roles in Washington’s corridors of power and his controversial tenure as secretary of state.

With dramatic new information about the inner workings of an administration locked in ideological combat, DeYoung makes clearer than ever before the decision-making process that took the nation to war and addresses the still-unanswered questions about Powell’s departure from his post shortly after the 2004 election. Drawing on interviews with U.S. and foreign sources as well as with Powell himself, and with unprecedented access to his personal and professional papers, Soldier is a revelatory portrait of an American icon: a man at once heroic and all-too-humanly fallible.

About the Author: Karen DeYoung is an associate editor at The Washington Post, where she has held a number of senior editing positions and served as a foreign policy reporter in Washington and correspondent abroad. She is the recipient of numerous awards for foreign correspondence and for diplomatic and explanatory journalism, including the 2002 Pulitzer Prize given to the Post for national coverage of the war on terrorism. A graduate of the University of Florida, she lives in Washington, D.C.

About the Narrator: Roscoe Orman's television credits include the role of "Gordon Robinson" on Sesame Street, as well as parts on Sanford and Son and All My Children. Orman's narration work includes PBS-TV's Langston Hughes: The Dream keeper and Hidden heritage for Discovery Channel's National Geographic.