Unafraid to speak her mind and famously tenacious in her convictions, Eleanor Roosevelt was still mourning the death of FDR when she was asked by President Truman to lead a controversial commission, under the auspices of the newly formed United Nations, to forge the world’s first international bill of rights.

A World Made New is the dramatic and inspiring story of the remarkable group of men and women from around the world who participated in this historic achievement and gave us the founding document of the modern human rights movement. Spurred on by the horrors of the Second World War and working against the clock in the brief window of hope between the armistice and the Cold War, they grappled together to articulate a new vision of the rights that every man and woman in every country around the world should share, regardless of their culture or religion.

A landmark work of narrative history based in part on diaries and letters to which Mary Ann Glendon, an award-winning professor of law at Harvard University, was given exclusive access, A World Made New is the first book devoted to this crucial turning point in Eleanor Roosevelt’s life, and in world history.


Finalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award “Riveting and important...Glendon tells this story with vivid detail and narrative drive.”
—The Washington Post

“Vividly written and evenhanded, A World Made New is an important, potentially galvanizing book, and in this frightful, ferocious time, marked by war and agony, it is urgent reading.”
—Blanche Wiesen Cook, Los Angeles Times

“A terrific story, and Glendon tells it well....An illuminating and unexpectedly timely book.”
—The New Republic

“The definitive account...Anybody concerned with the question of human rights in today’s world will need to read it and refer to it.”
—The New York Times Book Review