Young Mandela by David James Smith (Weidenfeld, £18.99; Buy this book; 340pp) Mandela himself has played down claims that he is a saint and, indeed, he has not always been regarded as a paragon of virtue by opponents — Margaret Thatcher regarded him pretty much as a terrorist. In this respectfully revisionist biography, dealing with the years before Mandela’s imprisonment in 1964, Smith is candid — at Mandela’s own behest, he says — about the effects of early poverty on his political attitudes, about the young Mandela’s decision to choose political activism over duty to his wives and children, and about his relationships with white activists, which even now the ANC plays down in its history of the struggle against apartheid.
Who are We — and Should it Matter in the 21st Century? by Gary Younge (Penguin, £14.99 Buy this book; 246pp) This collection of writings by a well-regarded journalist moving out of the newspaper comment pages is no vanity project. It deals intensely and critically with urgent questions facing a globalised world. Competing interests may resort to violence to preserve perceived values and privileges. In self-defence, the micro-security of our own personal being and status tends to seek shelter under the macro-shield of special-interest groups, and we so subsume our personal interests into group thinking and group activity. Younge is an acute analyst of disturbing trends and their problematical developments.
The Burma Campaign: Disaster into Triumph 1942-45 by Frank McLynn (Bodley Head, £20 Buy this book; 532pp McLynn, a prolific and conscientious chronicler of military history, tells his story from the viewpoints of four commanders of the Burma Campaign: Louis Mountbatten, Orde Wingate, Joe Stilwell and William Slim, none of whom, thanks to a variety of motives and antipathies, worked very well together. In any narrative of war and its strategies there are, in retrospect, dreadful miscalculations, well-deserved reversals and victories achieved more by luck than judgment. McLynn gives an honest, gruelling account of the longest, most punishing campaign fought by the British during the Second World War.