A Letter From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

When TIME's editors chose Mikhail Gorbachev as 1987's Man of the Year, five correspondents traveled thousands of miles and filled scores of notebooks to piece together the biography of the Soviet leader. They interviewed dozens of the General Secretary's colleagues, onetime schoolmates, the handful of foreigners who had met him over the years and others who had encountered the former Privolnoye farm boy on his remarkable journey to the Kremlin's top job. As the correspondents filed their reports, Managing Editor Henry Muller was impressed with the amount of new information they had uncovered about Gorbachev's early life and his rise through the party ranks. "For years editors have been saying that you could produce a book from the reporting that goes into some of our cover stories," says Muller. "That was certainly true with Gorbachev, so we thought we would give it a try."

Last week, less than three months after the Man of the Year issue appeared on newsstands, Mikhail S. Gorbachev: An Intimate Biography (a TIME book; $4.50 paperback, $14.95 hard cover) was in bookstores across the country. The 281- page book, like the cover story, blends fascinating personal detail (the young Gorbachev, for example, attended church with his grandparents) with an analysis of Gorbachev's leadership and reforms.

Included in the book are 16 pages of rare photographs, most of them collected for the Man of the Year issue by TIME Picture Researcher Robert Stevens. "Though Gorbachev is the leader of one of the world's two most powerful nations, little was known about who he is, where he came from and what he believes in," says Senior Editor Donald Morrison, who edited the book. "We believe our book is the most detailed biography published so far about this extraordinary man."

The book is the first joint project between the magazine and Time Inc.'s Books Group, the third largest book publisher in the country. "By using TIME's ability to report quickly and thoroughly and our ability to get the words into a book format, we drastically shortened the normal publication schedule," says Kelso Sutton, president and chief executive officer of the Books Group. Gorbachev, distributed by New American Library, will soon be followed by a second TIME book: a picture history of 1968, inspired by a cover story 2 1/2 months ago about the momentous events of a year that shaped an entire generation.