ODYSSEY TO FREEDOM, a memoir by the world-renowned human rights advocate, friend and lawyer to Nelson Mandela

616 pp., paperback, Johannesburg, 2007.

George Bizos was born in 1928 in the Greek village of Vasilitsi. During the Second World War he escaped from his occupied homeland, becoming a refugee in South Africa. Graduating from the University of the Witwatersrand with a legal degree and called to the Bar, he acted for many of Nelson Mandela's and Oliver Tambo's clients. He was involved with the Treason Trial of the late 1950s and the subsequent Rivonia Trial, the trials of Braam Fischer and Namibian Toivo ja Toivo, the trials of Winnie Mandela, the Delmas Trial, and other human-rights trials through the 1970s and 1980s. He acted for the ANC at the post-1994 constitutional hearings, was associated with the amnesty hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the 2004 treason trial of Zimbabwean opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai.