Few future contenders for the American presidency are more enigmatic than US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice. She is both regularly voted one of the most influential women in the world, and, in a poll taken well into her new post, the preferred dinner guest for men, ahead of a celebrity field including Angelina Jolie and Oprah Winfrey. Yet for a senior politician with such wide appeal, very little is known about her private life. Condoleezza Rice, who has remained unmarried, gave interviews for this first personal biography. She also consented to unqualified access to her close-knit family and friends. Many of her most powerful former colleagues were interviewed, including previous US Secretaries of State, George Shultz and James Baker. For the first time the full story is told of her childhood in violent Birmingham, Alabama, the heartland of brutal lynchings where her schoolfriend was killed by the Ku Klux Klan. Condoleezza Rice's father, the grandson of a former slave, was a colleague of Rev. Martin Luther King's and had an insider's view of the turbulent campaign against American apartheid. It drove Rice to excel at school and university, where she was nonetheless attracted to 'bad boys'. Her family, friends and mentor at university, who also inspired Madeleine Albright, were liberals. Nonetheless, Rice became a Republican and one of the 'Vulcans' who forged the successful election of George W Bush. When the two first met in the 1990s, they instantly got on. 'She just can't say no to that man,' according to her stepmother. Rice's loyalty and ambition have come at a high price. This biography shows that, as her power grew, her decisions - first on terrorism and then on Iraq - became increasingly flawed. It also shows that criticism of her abilities has been a constant theme of her career. None of the criticism matters to the 'Condinistas', the die-hards who are boosting her future.