SEASON'S OF HER LIFE: A Biography of Madeleine Korbel Albright.

• Author: Biddle, Wayne
• Position: Review

SEASONS OF HER LIFE: A Biography of Madeleine Korbel Albright by Ann Blackman Scribner, $27

Possibly the only thing one needs to know about Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright is that she was Zbigniew Brzezinski's favorite grad student. But Time magazine correspondent Ann Blackman provides far more in this detailed biography. There is much about Czechoslovakia before, during, and after World War II; foreign policy luminaries of the Democratic Party; the ever-evolving roles of Washington society wives (and ex wives); the never-ending question of authentic Jewish identity; and other morasses that Albright somehow navigated on her way to the top.

Though she now embodies the lead role in a popular immigrant success story--the war-torn refugee "who works harder than the rest of us," as Blackman writes--it would be a major insult to the huddled masses of history ever to cast Madeleine Albright as disadvantaged. Before the war, her father, Josef Korbel, was an ambitious Czechoslovak diplomat ensconced in the privileged circles of Prague and Belgrade. In 1939 he left with his wife and two-year-old "Madlenka" for England, where he helped organize his government-m-exile's information service in London. During the Battle of Britain, they moved first to a 16th century farmhouse owned by his brother and then to a new four-bedroom home where "a very pleasant life" ensued. Immediately after the war the family returned to "a large, five-room apartment with a big fireplace and separate maid's quarters" in Prague. In 1946, Korbel was named the first Czechoslovak ambassador to Yugoslavia.

Though he served the Czech Communist government for ten months after it came to power in 1948, Korbel defected near the end of that year and moved to the United States. His wife and three children--Madeleine now had a brother and sister--sailed first-class to New York with 21 pieces of luggage and a Yugoslavian maid. They settled in affluent Great Neck on Long Island before moving to Colorado, where Korbel became a professor of international relations at the University of Denver. Here began the swift Americanization of Madeleine Korbel, who attended the elite Kent School for Girls and entered Wellesley College in 1955. She graduated with honors and, hr more significantly, a diamond engagement ring from millionaire press scion Joseph Medill Paterson Albright.

Whether from their palatial estate on Oyster Bay, Long Island, where Joe's family published Newsday, or their...