"At forty-one, Gro Harlem Brundtland, physician and mother of four, was appointed Prime Minister of Norway - the youngest person and the first woman ever to hold that office. Nineteen years later, in 1997, she was named Director General of the World Health Organization, where she has expertly applied her skills as physician and politician to the urgent problems of hunger and disease worldwide.

In this plainspoken and refreshingly forthright memoir, Brundtland tells the story of her career as a series of challenges facing ambitious women everywhere. She writes candidly about encountering chauvinism in the media and among her political opponents, about applying her visionary principles to the developing world, about maintaining her bipartisan marriage and surviving a mother's worst nightmare.

She pointedly recalls her encounters with kings, presidents, emirs, generals, and clerics and their often unsatisfactory apprehensions of the challenges the world faces.".

"Norwegian society under Brundtland became synonymous with social democracy and the key concept of the global environmental movement, "sustainable development," is a lasting coinage of the Brundtland Commission of the United Nations, which also brought about the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio. With the World Health Organization, Brundtland has led a massive effort to control new and reemergent diseases in Africa and Asia.

Along the way she has made policy and broken bread with the likes of Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, Boris Yeltsin, and Margaret Thatcher."--BOOK JACKET.