Breaking Free: A Memoir of Love and Rebellion by Susan Eisenhower

Product Details

Synopsis

In 1987, when the Cold War was still being waged, two people whose lives and work seemed to express the very issues that kept the superpowers apart met and fell in love. Susan Eisenhower was the granddaughter of a Cold War American President; Roald Sagdeev was head of the Soviet space program, adviser on arms control to Gorbachev, and Hero of Socialist Labor. Here is the author's extraordinary account of how their mutual trust blossomed into love as the Cold War drew to an end and as the Soviet Union trembled on the brink of collapse. This real-life story is a major document about high-level American and Soviet politics, written by a woman well placed to understand both. And it is also a heart-stopping memoir about two brave, resourceful people who cared desperately about making a future together.

Annotation

In 1987, as the Cold War raged, two people--the granddaughter of a former American president and the head of the Soviet space program--met and fell in love. In this extraordinary account, Eisenhower offers the enthralling, real-life story of two brave, resourceful people whose love transcended all barriers and borders.

Publishers Weekly

Eisenhower, a step-grandmother and the twice divorced mother of three daughters, is not being fanciful when she writes of her identification with Romeo and Juliet. In her case, the antagonistic forces were the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., either of which might have proscribed her marriage to Soviet physicist Roald Sagdeev. In a memoir written against the chaotic background of Gorbachev's perestroika, which she makes immediate and vivid, Eisenhower recreates the growing love between herself and Sagdeev, whom she met in 1987 at a U.S.-U.S.S.R. forum in New York. Before they married in 1990, the couple rendezvoused in Russia, the U.S. and various European countries at foundation and political meetings at which the author, the granddaughter of the 34th president of the U.S. and president of the Eisenhower Institute, is often a guest. The couple maintained a public professional decorum while meeting clandestinely for intimacy. If Eisenhower writes with surprising emotion of the upheavals in today's Russia, her passion is perhaps a reflection of her experiences in conducting her affair with Sagdeev and of her concerns for the Russians who became like family to her. She conveys the personal and the political with equal intensity in these pages. Of the couple's blood relatives we are given only glimpses, but they delightfully relax the book's fervor: At their awkward introduction, the author's father and her husband-to-be end up singing Russian folk songs as they drive the back roads of Pennsylvania; when the author first meets her aged father-in-law, a Tatar and a devout Communist, he whoops with pleasure at the fact that when he dies he can look up his new kin, President Eisenhower. (June)