Eva Perón
My Mission in Life.
Vantage Press, 1953. First US edition. 216 pages.
Volume, measuring approximately 6" x 9", is bound in beige cloth, with gilt-lettered brown spine label and stamped gilt lettering to front cover. Book shows mild wear, with light dust soiling to top edge of text block. Binding is firm. Interior is clean and bright. Illustrated with b&w photographic plates. Dust jacket, with price of $2.75 on front flap, foxing to spine panel, minor wear at edges, with very small loss at top edge of front panel. Jacket is preserved in mylar cover.
"In 1951, Eva Perón's autobiography, "La Razón de Mi Vida," was published in Argentina and immediately became a best-seller. It has since appeared in translation in many parts of the world, and is now available for the first time to American readers.
Ten years previously Eva Peron was little know by her people. Between Juan Perón's first emergence in political affairs and his election to the presidency in 1946, she share his meteorlike rise to fame. By the time he assumed absolute power in Argentina with the title of Leader added to that of President, the name Eva Perón was equally if not perhaps more widely known throughout the world.
Her glamourous blond beauty - her political astuteness - her unparalleled role as "Evita" - all these were widely publicized. But singularly little was know of her inner life. "My Mission in Life,: which seems to have been written wit the premonition of death, is her own frank statement regarding the motives which actuated her in becoming Perón's disciple, wife, and collaborator.
In highly charged, emotional prose, which reveals the intensity of her feelings, she discloses her part in the revolution which set up Perón's"justicialist" regime. Here is the inside story of Eva Perón's activities as liaison between her husband and the powerful trade-union syndicates, as head of the Peronista Feminist Movement, and as "Evita," special advocate and mediator for the "descamisados" ("shirtless one") of Argentina.
The extent of these candid disclosures is typified in the chapter entitled "Eva Perón and "Evita"", in which she reveals her "double life" in two sharply contrasted, almost directly opposed personalities.
Tying together these many aspects of her brief career is her adoration of, her almost complete identification with, her husband. Yet she tells too of the rebellious "Evita" who often came home in the morning hours from an all-night occupation in regard to some social-welfare project, to be affectionately upbraided by her husband, already up and dressed for the day's work. And neither his remonstrances nor the pleas of her doctors - until the very end - stopped this spendthrift stream of energy.
Eva Perón was not merely the wife of her country's leader. A power in her own right she was a force that will live in the annals of history - the most powerful woman politically in either hemisphere during a momentous era. "My Mission in Life" tells as much as may ever be known of this talented, fascinating, enigmatic woman."