King: A Life
by
88/99
Critics' Rating Index
98/99
Readers' Rating Index
92/99
Scholars' Citation Index
98/99
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About This Book
Winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize. The first full biography in decades, Eig mixes revelatory and exhaustive new research with brisk and accessible storytelling to forge the definitive life for our times. Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig's A Life is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.―and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself. He casts fresh light on the King family's origins as well as MLK's complex relationships with his wife, father, and fellow activists. King reveals a minister wrestling with his own human frailties and dark moods, a citizen hunted by his own government, and a man determined to fight for justice even if it proved to be a fight to the death. As he follows MLK from the classroom to the pulpit to the streets of Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis, Eig dramatically re-creates the journey of a man who recast American race relations and became our only modern-day founding father―as well as the nation's most mourned martyr. In this landmark biography, Eig gives us an MLK for our a deep thinker, a brilliant strategist, and a committed radical who led one of history's greatest movements, and whose demands for racial and economic justice remain as urgent today as they were in his lifetime. Includes 8 pages of black-and-white photographs
Reviews
"It draws on a landslide of recently released White House telephone transcripts, F.B.I."
"Eig has brought to this extensive work new facts concerning King's family life and public image, delving into FBI files and other hitherto untapped sources ..."
"Drawing on recently released FBI files, telephone recordings and interviews for this first full-scale biography in decades, Eig acknowledges King's frailties and failures, as well as his radical critique of economic inequality and the war in Vietnam ..."
"King's story has been told so many times that it is hard to say anything new."
"Vibrantly written ..."
"Eig begins the book with a revealing portrait of 'Daddy King,' Martin Luther King Sr ..."
"An enthralling reappraisal that confirms King's relevance to today's debates over racial justice."
"The first comprehensive biography of the black civil rights hero to appear in more than thirty years, and it will succeed my own Bearing the Cross (BTC), published in 1986, as the standard account ..."
"A sober and intimate portrait of King's short life, and one that can't help but be admiring, given how much King accomplished, and how quickly he did so."
"Eig takes the time to thoroughly document King's many affairs – much of which we know about because of the FBI's relentless surveillance ..."
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