The doomsday machine Confessions of a nuclear war planner

ELASTIC: Unlocking Your Brain's Ability to Embrace Change, by Leonard Mlodinow. (Vintage, $16.) Our capacity to stretch beyond the bounds of our preconceptions and other deeply held beliefs, what Mlodinow calls "elastic thinking," is essential to innovation, creativity and independent thought. He offers an engaging guide to the brain's power to solve new problems, weaving together scientific research, politics and literature. BRASS, byXhenet Aliu. (Random House, $17.) Elsie and Lulu, the mother and daughter whose potent relationship forms the core of this debut novel, are desperate to leave behind their hardscrabble lives. As our reviewer, Julie Buntin, put it, the book "offers a reminder that assumptions - whether about a place, or a person as close to you as your mother - never tell the full story." THE WINE LOVER'S DAUGHTER: A Memoir, by Anne Fadiman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.) In her study of her father, the literary critic Clifton Fadiman, the author uses his infatuation with wine to explore the motivations that guide connoisseurship and hedonism. Though Fadiman does not share her father's ardent love of the drink, her wine-focused vignettes sketch a portrait of their complicated relationship. MACBETH, by Jo Nesbo. Translated by Don Bartlett. (Hogarth Shakespeare, $16.) In his reimagining of Shakespeare's tragedy, the Norwegian crime writer draws out the play's noir elements, transposing its moral choices and plot to 1970s Glasgow as the city strained under corruption, violence and addiction. Our reviewer, James Shapiro, praised the adaptation, calling the book "a dark but ultimately hopeful 'Macbeth,' one suited to our own troubled times, in which 'the slowness of democracy' is no match for power-hungry strongmen." THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, by Daniel Ellsberg. (Bloomsbury, $18.) Ellsberg, best known as the former military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers, makes an impassioned call for reducing the risk of nuclear destruction. Though widespread fears about nuclear war have largely receded since the end of the Cold War in 1991, Ellsberg argues that there's plenty of reason for concern. TANGERINE, by Christine Mangan. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $16.99.) Alice and Lucy were once close college friends, and a dark episode from those years haunts their reconciliation in Morocco. In a novel that borrows from Paul Bowles and Patricia Highsmith, the two characters, neither of them a trustworthy narrator, get caught up in a mysterious disappearance in Tangier.

*Starred Review* Ellsberg titled his first memoir, an account of his legendary leak of the Pentagon Papers, Secrets (2002), but he has been harboring many more disclosures of far greater impact for the last 47 years. In this gripping and unnerving book of confessions, Ellsberg reveals that along with the top-secret materials about the Vietnam War he copied as a high-clearance strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation and the Defense Department, he also amassed a large cache of classified papers documenting the appalling truth about the perilously inadequate control of nuclear weapons. Ellsberg would have brought these records forward decades ago, but after his trial, which led not to his conviction but to Nixon's resignation, they were lost in a hurricane. Now, thanks to government declassification and online archives, he is finally able to recount with searing specificity such hidden horrors as the delegation of the authority to initiate nuclear attacks, the erroneous assumptions behind the arms race, his role in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the facts about other near-disasters. Entwining affecting personal revelations with jolting governmental disclosures, declaring that Stanley Kubrick's infamous nuclear-weapons satire, Dr. Strangelove (1964), was, essentially, a documentary, and citing our tense standoff with North Korea, Ellsberg concludes his dramatic elucidation of how the nuclear arsenal endangers all of life on Earth with steps for dismantling this Doomsday Machine. A must-read of the highest order, Ellsberg's profoundly awakening chronicle is essential to our future. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Ellsberg's concussive nuclear confessions will generate heated media coverage, which will be further escalated by Steven Spielberg's forthcoming Pentagon Papers movie, The Post, starring Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist

Ellsberg (Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers) mixes autobiography and history as he details the horrifying realities of America's nuclear-weapons apparatus, with an aim to inspire future "courageous whistleblowers." As a Harvard postgraduate fellow, Ellsberg's work on decision theory attracted the RAND Corp.'s attention. In 1959 he joined a study of the communication of the "execute" message to launch nuclear strikes, coming to focus on how to ensure that no subordinate decided to attack without clear authorization. To Ellsberg's amazement, the military's vaunted "fail-safe" system didn't work. He also learned that America's pledge never to attack first is fiction; the U.S. would have struck if convinced that the U.S.S.R. was about to attack. He describes how a single, exquisitely detailed plan would have directed thousands of bombs onto Eastern Bloc targets, as well as China, even if China was not involved in a planned attack. America's sole deterrence of the Soviet Union was to threaten Armageddon. Ellsberg recounts with precision both public and top secret arguments over American nuclear-war policy during the three decades after WWII. Despite modest improvements since, little has fundamentally changed. Ellsberg's brilliant and unnerving account makes a convincing case for disarmament and shows that the mere existence of nuclear weapons is a serious threat to humanity. Agent: Andy Ross, Andy Ross Literary. (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.