AC

Nelson Mandela, who led a revolution against injustice from a prison cell and who overthrew history by turning his back on violence, is dead. He was 95 years old. Most of us saw him for the last time when South Africa hosted the World Cup in 2010. Mr. Mandela, an amateur boxer and the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, rose from poverty and obscurity to defeat the white minority rule of apartheid and become the president of South Africa. Known now to everyone everywhere, one of the best men of a bad century, he fills four or five shelves of world biography. Read everything and you'll still struggle to understand his impossible courage. Start here. As we've done with only a handful of public figures before him, we think of Mandela not only as a player on some distant global stage, but as a marker of our own personal experience, integral to any reminiscence of who we were and are and how we came to be. Mandela went to prison for his...