December 1, 2022
With King, the New York Times best-selling Eig ( Ali), a former senior writer for the Wall Street Journal, draws on recently declassified FBI files to create a bold new study of Martin Luther King Jr. (100,000-copy first printing). Drafted by the FBI as a trilingual counterterrorism researcher, Billy Reilly went to Russia when it first invaded Ukraine's Donbas region and promptly cut off all communication; it was unclear whether the FBI actually sent him, but Reilly's parents asked Wall Street Journal reporter Forrest to find their Lost Son (100,000-copy first printing). AsSlate staff writer Grabar clarifies in Paved Paradise, parking matters; we've distorted our landscape to find cheap and easy ways to store our cars, with much valuable real estate devoted to vehicles sitting empty when space for affordable housing is desperately needed; at least Grabar proposes solutions. Following This Is Not a T-Shirt, a memoir about his clothing brand, Hundreds (aka Bobby Kim) limns his venture into NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens), Web3, and the Metaverse in NFTs Are a Scam / NFTs Are the Future (75,000-copy first printing). Former secretary of the Treasury and cochair of Goldman Sachs, Rubin draws on six decades' worth of experience in business and politics to explain how to make smart decisions in an uncertain world; it all begins with sketching out the possibilities on a simple Yellow Pad (or now an iPad). In Traffic, former BuzzFeed editor in chief Smith shows how Nick Denton's Gawker and Jonah Peretti's HuffPost and BuzzFeed fatefully duked it out for control of internet media in the early 2000s, arguing that the unintended consequence was a rightward shift in the internet's orientation. Windham-Campbell Award-winning South African writer Steinberg shows how the marriage of Winnie and Nelson Mandela reflects the course of South African history and tensions within the antiapartheid movement, as Winnie moved toward supporting armed insurrection while Nelson was jailed.
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Starred review from March 6, 2023
Journalist Steinberg (A Man of Good Hope) vividly recreates the political and private lives of anti-apartheid activists Nelson and Winnie Mandela in this exceptional dual biography. African National Congress (ANC) leader Nelson Mandela and social worker Nomzamo Winifred Madikizela met in Johannesburg in 1957. Already a target of the white ruling authorities, Nelson went underground in 1961; arrested and jailed the following year for inciting a strike, he eventually received a lifetime prison sentence. While cultivating an aura of suffering and martyrdom from his cell, Nelson evolved into an inspirational figurehead for a free South Africa. Meanwhile, Winnie raised their daughters, supported the family, and made a place for herself in the ANC. By the 1970s, the ANC became South Africa’s preeminent anti-apartheid organization and the Mandelas internationally known as its leaders. Privately, their marriage cracked under the strain. Winnie began taking lovers when Nelson first went underground, which he knew and accepted, though he preferred the myth he wove of their relationship. Rumors also circulated about her drinking and violent behavior. Two years after Nelson’s release in 1990, the couple divorced, costing Winnie the last of the power she held with the ANC. The tumultuous decades apart had turned them into “astonishingly scarred human beings,” Steinberg writes. Readers will be mesmerized by the thrumming tension and profound emotional complexity of this intimate portrait of two global icons. It’s a knockout. Illus.
Starred review from April 15, 2023
Can love, power, and politics ever coexist in a marriage? At 38, Nelson Mandela was married and a local superstar when he met 20-year-old Nomzamo Winifred Madikizela, a force of nature from a powerful political family. In acclaimed South African writer Steinberg's elegant and masterful account, we see them as the "first political celebrity couple," who would revolutionize South African society. Despite spending most of their early years apart since they had only been married two years before Nelson went to prison for the first time, it is clear from the many letters they exchanged how profoundly each influenced the other and how much they were in each other's thoughts. With Nelson's travails at Robben Island more well-known, Steinberg gives Winnie her due as an implacable freedom fighter. Imprisoned and repeatedly tortured, she coolly described how the experience sharpened her commitment and realization that there could be no compromise in the demand for Black rights. Despite multiple infidelities, political infighting, and accusations of corruption and murder leading to a savage divorce, Winnie and Nelson remained fiercely committed to each other. At the end of his life, afflicted with dementia, it was Winnie Nelson who was called on to feed him and share his final moments. Steinberg has created a landmark biography of two unforgettable civil rights heroes.
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Starred review from May 1, 2023
South African scholar and award-winning author Steinberg (A Man of Good Hope) presents an engrossing joint biography of Nelson Mandela and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, his wife of nearly 40 years. Twenty years her senior, Nelson spent much of his time in an early leadership role in the African National Congress and other groups formed to protest against the apartheid regime. That meant time away from Winnie and their young children. In 1962, Nelson was arrested and sentenced to life in prison; he ultimately served 27 years. Throughout his imprisonment, Winnie grew into a national symbol of defiance, fighting apartheid in her own way. This book portrays the relationship between Winnie and Nelson and how it changed over the years of his imprisonment and after his release. It is deeply researched, and sources include recently released archives documenting secret recordings of conversations that Nelson had while in prison. Not only does this book reveal intimate details of a marriage under terrible pressure, but it also provides an insightful history of the fight against apartheid, including the roles of many other key figures. VERDICT This is a superb addition to the history of South Africa and the struggle against apartheid.--Rebecca Mugridge
Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
Starred review from April 1, 2023
A probing study of a complicated marriage that became emblematic of the revolutionary struggle against apartheid in South Africa. In this eloquent biography, Steinberg, author of A Man of Good Hope and Sizwe's Test, captures the mythic quality of these two leaders, their great love story and tragic estrangement, and the hubris and human frailty beneath the personas. While Nelson Mandela, imprisoned for nearly three decades, became the "personal embodiment of his people's quest for freedom," his untouchable grandeur only growing with time, Winnie was scarred by raw passion, anger, violence, and scandal. Nonetheless, she is an entirely sympathetic character here. Steinberg begins with composite portraits of each before they met in 1957, when Nelson was a sought-after lawyer in Johannesburg, married with children, and Winnie, at 21, was a social worker with a fiance. Nelson and Winnie had both grown up amid clans undergoing "great ambition and rapid self-transformation," and both had a sense of how politically dynamic their match could be. Enmeshed in Black nationalist politics, Nelson became leader of the African National Congress and eventually embraced armed struggle. Married in 1958, the couple would barely live together two years before Nelson was sentenced to life in prison on Robben Island. Steinberg also delineates how Winnie "had built her household in a world full of young men's violence," and her reputation was tarnished when she was implicated in a variety of human rights violations. The truth is muddied by conflicting versions, but her connection to Nelson allowed her protection from justice. While his role as leader required supreme self-discipline, masking his enormous pain at his wife's infidelity and treachery, her actions "stand as a monument to the revolution's underbelly, a reminder of lives lost for nothing." The author is careful not to vilify her while deifying him; rather, he presents a nuanced, well-contextualized look at their relationship within its time. A magnificent portrait of two people joined in the throes of making South African history.
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