touch scattershot at points, for the author attempts to argue for many things at once—the need to protect children from advertising, support public broadcasting, preserve public lands against corporate land grabs, and so forth. Still, his idea of society comes first, and though it is not necessarily socialist, Kahn mounts a preemptive defense against that charge. Elsewhere, he enlists the support of other thinkers to refute the grabby pretenses of the radical Right—including Mike Mansfield, the contrarian senator who is too little evoked today. But the author does most of his own heavy lifting, serving up a modern rejoinder to Paine’s famed pamphlet Common Sense. Paine would be proud, even if Kahn’s small book likely reaches few readers beyond the already converted. (First printing of 15,000. Author tour to New York, Boston, Providence, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Seattle, Portland, Ore., San Francisco, Helena, Mt.)
NO BREAD FOR MANDELA Memoirs of Ahmed Kathrada, Prisoner No. 468/64
Kathrada, Ahmed Univ. Press of Kentucky (448 pp.) $19.95 paperback original | April 15, 2011 978-0-8131-3375-1 Anti-apartheid political prisoner Kathrada examines his actions and the aftermath that resulted in 30 years of imprisonment. The author offers a unique behind-the-scenes view of South Africa’s apartheid struggles. After being misidentified as an antigovernment militant, Kathrada was imprisoned alongside the country’s future leaders, including future president Nelson Mandela. In Mandela’s introduction, he notes his and Kathrada’s interconnected stories, how “the telling of one without the voice of the other being heard somewhere would have led to an incomplete narrative.” While Mandela’s political success has allowed his name to become far more recognizable throughout the world, Kathrada’s literary contribution reveals a much-needed layer of history of both men’s experiences. The author gives the reader a glimpse behind the prison door, but also offers a historical perspective of the fierceness of the South African race problem. In one memorable scene, Kathrada described placing an inebriated political enemy in a compromising situation involving a prostitute. However, once the pictures were snapped and the evidence gathered, he brought them to Mandela who, rather than encouraging their publication, helped Kathrada weigh the moral cost of destroying a man’s career simply for disagreeing with his politics. After much reflection, Kathrada destroyed the incriminating photos, sparing the man his much-deserved shame while revealing an instance of rare civility when none was ever offered to him. An intimate, welcome first-person account of a portion of South African history that remains foggy to many American readers. (Author appearances in Boston, Lexington, Ky., Washington, D.C., New York, Los Angeles)
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15 MINUTES General Curtis LeMay and the Countdown to Nuclear Annihilation Keeney, L. Douglas St. Martin’s (352 pp.) $26.00 | February 1, 2011 978-0-312-61156-9
A history of United States nuclear warfare based heavily on declassified documents. Military Channel cofounder Keeney (Gun Camera Pacific, 2004, etc.) explains the evolution of U.S. mass-destruction weaponry from 1945 through 1968. The primary perspective is that of the Strategic Air Command, the high-powered organization developed by Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay. The author focuses on the first two possessors of nuclear weapons: the United States and the Soviet Union. In that sense, the book is also a history of the Cold War as defined by two superpower nations. U.S. presidents and military officials said they would never initiate the use of nuclear weapons, but rather wanted a strong retaliatory force to wipe out the Soviet Union in response to an attack. The nofirst-strike claim might have sounded hollow, considering the United States had become the first, and only, nation to drop nuclear weapons on another country—Japan in 1945. Still, LeMay, as well as presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, apparently believed the rhetoric, and thus built up U.S. defense accordingly, at the cost of billions of dollars, tragic accidents and lost lives. With a cast of hundreds, the narrative becomes a dizzying welter of human names, agency names, geographic names and weaponry names. Keeney organizes the chapters by year, but within each chapter jumps around among various “episodic vignettes.” Most of the vignettes are clearly composed, but their arrangement is occasionally random. The author’s information-gathering skills, especially his unearthing and decoding of previously classified documents, make the book worthwhile despite the difficulty following the interconnected sagas. (16-page black-and-white photo insert. Agent: Doug Grad/Doug Grad Literary Agency)
KING’S CROSS The Story of the World in the Life of Jesus Keller, Timothy Dutton (256 pp.) $25.95 | February 22, 2011 978-0-525-95210-7
Exploring the life of Jesus through the Gospel of Mark. Preacher and author Keller (Generous Justice: How God’s Grace Makes Us Just, 2010, etc.) provides a fresh biography of Jesus from an evangelical standpoint. Focusing on Mark, the earliest, shortest and most direct of the four gospels, the author paints a picture of a savior who was sure of his own identity and fate while most of those
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