Based in part on hundreds of interviews, this gossipy, intimate, bubbly portrait by the bestselling biographer of Lady Randolph Churchill ( Jennie ) and John Kennedy ( A Hero for Our Time ) strips away Meir's tough-minded politician's exterior to fathom a lonely, tender-hearted woman aching for love. Martin reveals that her marriage to bookish dreamer Morris Meyerson was a hollow shell, a protective screen that enabled her to carry on affairs with a wide variety of men. Short on political analysis and sometimes myopic, his informal narrative follows feisty ``Goldie'' from her first eight years in Kiev where she was born in 1893 to Milwaukee's lower west side where her family settled, through her early Zionist activity in Denver, her migration to Palestine and her increasingly prominent role as champion of Israeli statehood. The story ends in 1948 with Israel's creation; presumably a second installment will follow. This book should be as popular as Martin's previous biographies. Photos not seen by PW. 100,000 first printing; major ad/promo; BOMC alternate. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

A founder of Israel and later Prime Minister, Meir was one of the most influential women of the 20th century. She projected an image of pragmatism combined with unwavering devotion to the cause of creating and maintaining a Jewish homeland. Now best-selling biographer Martin ( Jennie ) reveals her human side. Emphasizing her inadequacies as a wife and mother and cataloguing her alleged lovers, Martin traces Meir's life through 1948. Although he interweaves her political successes with her human frailties, Martin fails to make his subject come alive; however, the titillating revelations, the author's reputation, and BOMC status will undoubtedly make this a highly requested title. BOMC alternate. Andrea Caron Kempf, Johnson Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, Kan. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Martin, author of the bestselling Jennie, the story of Winston Churchill's mother, and A Hero For Our Time, a biography of John F. Kennedy, has now written a dramatic, exciting, page-turner biography of the early years of the colorful Israeli prime minister. Martin follows MeWs story from her impoverished childhood in the 1890's in Pinsk, Russia, to her Americanization in Milwaukee and her first years of independence in Denver, and on to Palestine in the 1940's. The author's vivid and well-researched account gives a strong sense of the origins of the legendary courage, strength, and political brilliance of this woman who was integral to the founding of the state of Israel. At the same time, it recounts her more ordinary personal difficulties--conflicts with parents who wanted her to be a more conventional woman and discouraged her pursuit of politics and intellectual growth; the failure of her marriage; the illness of her daughter. And Martin also captures the little known romantic side of this complex woman, limning MeWs many secret loves after the deterioration of her marriage. Her lovers, the political leaders of Zionism, were also her mentors and rivals, and so politics and romance were forever intertwined in her life. A highly readable, novelistic biography that enhances the historical figure of Meir by uncovering the romantic Meir--who emerges as an even more impressive woman who let nothing stand in the way of her dream of the state of Israel, and who was constantly embattled not only with the British and the Arabs but with the emotional wars in her love life. A potential big seller. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.