In December 1971, after having stepped down as the United Nations’ longest-serving Secretary-General, U Thant was ranked the sixth ‘most admired man’ in America. So why is he largely forgotten today?

In Peacemaker, Thant Myint-U traces his grandfather’s rise from schoolteacher in a small Burmese backwater in 1947 to celebrity at the centre of global of politics just two decades later. He reveals U Thant’s integral yet forgotten roles in some of the twentieth centuries’ most critical crises – from battling white supremacist mercenaries in the Congo and mediating a peaceful end to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 to ensuring the ceasefire held after the 1967 Six-Day War – and details the shifting world order that U Thant affected.

At once rigorous and hugely entertaining, Peacemaker is an intimate biography that not only attests to the power of hope, peace and individual actions in times of uncertainty, but also chronicles a golden age of diplomacy: a time when people believed that it was only by coming together that we could tackle the biggest threats posing humanity.