The price was steep.

Mandela
The Authorized Biography
Anthony Sampson
Alfred A. Knopf, $30, 672 pp.

No sane man gives up almost twenty-eight years of his life-vital years, prime years-except for some large, transcendent purpose. No sane man sacrifices the comforts of home and family except for some grand, majestic goal. No man endures what Nelson Mandela endured in the prisons of apartheid South Africa except for a noble, compelling ideal.

Mandela's ideal was a "nonracial democracy," with fairness and equality for all. He enunciated it most eloquently in 1963, at his trial (along with a host of other leaders and activists of the African National Congress) for treason against a state in which his only right as a black man was to do as he was told by whites.

"During my lifetime," Mandela said in his oft-quoted peroration, "I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die."

Fortunately for South Africa, fortunately for the world, he was not forced to die for his ideal. Unlike Moses and Martin Luther King, Jr., Mandela finally made it to the Promised Land with his people. Indeed, he led them in. But oh! What a price he had to pay!

Anthony Sampson has done a real service with this authoritative biography of Mandela. It will fill a gap in popular knowledge of a man who has become one of the heroes of our time. And it no doubt will be a valuable resource for future biographers.

But it is, in many respects, an unsatisfying book. It is quite evident, for example, that Sampson is more journalist than biographer. The book provides an enormous amount of information about Mandela, about South Africa, about the black liberation struggle, and related people and events. So much information, in fact, that the answers to the most important questions-what does the subject believe in? what is the mainspring of his action? what transcendent purpose motivates his work and, in Mandela's case, his sacrifice?-are virtually buried under the mountain of relatively insignificant detail.

I yield to no one in my admiration for and curiosity about Nelson Mandela. But as I read this long, long book, I found myself wishing there were less of it. Much less. For less, I suspect, would ultimately have been more. Additionally-and this is another journalist's habit- there is a tendency to depict all of Mandela's thoughts and actions in terms of tactics and strategy. This is not unlike the current practice in American political coverage of focusing on the "horse race" aspects of an election campaign, to the exclusion of any serious coverage of the substance of candidates' speeches and ideas and programs. In Mandela's case, this approach tends to shrink a great man to a small one-or worse, to the stature of a common, scheming, ward-heeling pol.

Such reservations aside, Sampson, a Briton who first met Mandela in 1951, does a commendable job of tracing the course of Nelson Mandela's life, from his birth in 1918 in the Transkei region of South Africa to his retirement from the presidency in 1999, at the end of his first and only term.

Mandela was the son of a Xhosa chief, and thus a minor royal in his tribe. His was not a pampered upbringing, but he did grow up with a sense of entitlement and self-importance because of his family background. He began to lose those illusions at Clarkebury, the Methodist missionary school where he matriculated in 1934. "Mandela was expecting the other pupils to treat him with respect as a royal whose great-grandfather had founded the school," Sampson writes. "Instead he was mocked by one girl pupil for his country boy's accent, his slowness in class, and for walking in his brand-new boots 'like a horse in spurs.' He found himself in a community which respected merit and intelligence more than hereditary status."

In his youth and young adulthood, Sampson says, Mandela's aspirations were anything but grand and majestic. Quite the contrary. At Fort Hare, the black college he attended, "his immediate ambition was to be a court interpreter, a much-esteemed profession in the rural areas, which promised both influence and status....He saw a degree as his passport not to political leadership, but to a position in the community which would enable him to support his family."

The political bug did not bite Mandela until, still single, he moved to Johannesburg in 1941, and even then it didn't happen immediately. Mandela spent several years just finding his footing in the city, which included finding his vocation, the law. When Mandela did fall into politics, he fell hard-like a young lover smitten. His love was the African National Congress, the oldest (founded in 1912) and most enduring organization devoted to equality for blacks and the concept of a nonracial democracy. It endured largely because of the loyalty of Mandela and the colleagues-black, white, colored, Indian-who made common cause with him in prison, in exile, and in opposition within South Africa.

Of necessity, much of Sampson's book concerns Mandela's life in prison- his relationships with the prison authorities and with his warders, most of them uneducated Afrikaners whom he attempted to understand and "convert"; his rigorous self-discipline; his gradually evolved role as the acknowledged leader of the ANC and the liberation cause; and ultimately his negotiations with P.W. Botha and F.W. deKlerk for his own release and the legalization of the ANC and other proscribed political organizations.

"The prison years," Sampson writes, "are often portrayed as a long hiatus in the midst of Mandela's political career; but I see them as key to his development, transforming the headstrong activist into the reflective and self-disciplined world statesman." It is that statesman that we see on television nowadays and read about in the newspapers. But the price of that transformation was high, and not just for Mandela himself.

The most poignant and wrenching chapters of the book deal with his separation from his wife, Winnie, and his children, and the effect that separation had on all of them. Winnie, who was brutalized by the apartheid regime and became brutal in turn, might have become destructive in any case. But it is not unreasonable to think that the daily presence of Nelson might have attenuated her worst instincts.

Mandela the hero paid a terrible price for his triumph-and so, sadly, did his wife and family. If, in future years, anyone is tempted to say that the apartheid era was not all that bad (as some now say of slavery and the segregation era in the United States), let them read here what it did to Nelson Mandela's family.

Don Wycliff is editorial page editor of the Chicago Tribune.