Peacemaker

In December 1971, after having stepped down as the United Nations’ longest-serving Secretary-General, U Thant was ranked the sixth ‘most admired man’ in America. So why is he largely forgotten today? In ‘Peacemaker’, Thant Myint-U traces his grandfather’s rise from schoolteacher in a small Burmese backwater in 1947 to celebrity at the centre of global politics just two decades later. He reveals U Thant’s integral yet forgotten roles in some of the twentieth centuries’ most critical crises – from battling white supremacist mercenaries in the Congo and mediating a peaceful end to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 to ensuring the ceasefire held after the 1967 Six-Day War – and details the shifting world order that U Thant affected.