Breaking Free: A Memoir of Love and Revolution

by Susan Eisenhower

Offers the story of the romance and marriage of an American president's granddaughter and Russia's top rocket scientist

295 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1995

About the author

SUSAN EISENHOWER, one of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's four grandchildren, is a consultant, author, and a Washington, DC-based policy strategist with many decades of work on national security issues. She lectures widely on such topics, including strategic leadership.

Reviews

[Anne]

I was impressed with her address to the Democratic Convention, one of the few that sounded thoughtful and made references to history, so I looked her up on Google. A week later I found this book at the library sale, a library discard. Eisenhower is a dry historian but the story of her romance and marriage with Roald Sagdeev, formerly head of the Russian space program, is compelling. It's definitely a skim because she's so thorough in reporting all the conference participants and people they both worked with. But the people they knew were part of the epic struggle in the Soviet Union and it depicts the Gorbachev/Yeltsin period, Roald's friendship with Sakharov, KGB actions toward them, conditions in the countryside when they visited both relatives and victims of Soviet crackdowns. Their struggle to even live together in the same country seemed a fairy tale with a happy ending. But then I googled her again and found that they've divorced, but remain "good friends."

[Carolyn]

I read this book because I had the privilege of actually meeting Susan Eisenhower in Athens, GA. Although much of the political issues were above me, it was still a very interesting account of the story and marriage of a president's granddaughter to a high-level Soviet scientist.