When Violeta Chamorro defeated Daniel Ortega in 1990 to become president of Nicaragua, despite a knee injury that put her on crutches for the entire campaign, most observers were shocked. Ortega's party, the Sandinistas, controlled the country, except for the Catholic Church and Mrs. Chamorro's newspaper, La Prensa, which, virtually alone, predicted the outcome accurately. After the election, many doubted that the Sandinistas would permit Mrs.

Chamorro to take office, but she did, thanks in no small part to her own canny political instincts in reaching out to the Sandinistas rather than retaliating against them for causing a decade of oppression and poverty. After six years in office she has brought her country back from ruin, ending a civil war and revitalizing an economy that had become the second worst in the Western Hemisphere. Perhaps most remarkable of all, Mrs.

Chamorro had never held office before, and from childhood had had no other aspiration than to raise a family.

Although written by a sitting president, this is a memoir like no other - intensely personal and deeply moving. President Chamorro explains that her lack of political experience left her to govern by the model she knew best, raising a family. Her own children were politically divided, like her country, and she tried to keep communication open among them.

She did the same for what she calls her family of Nicaragua, reconciling left and right whenever possible, trying to put past political turmoil behind her. Devoted to the memory of her martyred husband, committed to her religious faith and her faith in democracy, Violeta Chamorro has ruled from the heart and led her country from disaster to recovery.