The authors are longtime advocates for reforming the criminal-justice system, but this indispensable book casts a far wider net in its nuanced call for incremental rather than massive change as the best way to ensure a fairer society. “Radical realism” is their rallying cry, and they offer persuasive examples of how this has worked in the past (the establishment of Social Security in the 1930s, which has lifted millions of Americans above the poverty line as they age) and how it could work in the future (the full utilization of available green cards, which now include more than 210,000 unallocated documents, would allow more people to legally obtain permanent residency, thus reducing the number of undocumented foreigners). Given how resistant most Americans are to big change, Aubrey Fox and Greg Berman convincingly argue that, as Yale professor Charles Lindblom put it, “if politics were a game of golf, the government should mainly use the putter, even for long distances.”
On Easter weekend in 1993, three years after Nelson Mandela was freed from prison and in the midst of power-sharing talks with President F. W. de Klerck, Mandela’s protégé Chris Hani was assassinated. The killer was Janusz Waluś, a white supremacist whose goal was nothing less than to incite a race war that would scuttle the talks and plunge South Africa into chaos. Justice Malala, a young journalist at the time who covered the crime, retraces in vivid detail the nine days after Hani’s murder, in which not only was civil war averted but, miraculously, the talks began again with greater urgency than before. The Plot to Save South Africais part thriller, part memoir, part investigative journalism, and entirely a riveting chronicle about the triumph of leadership over despair.
