King: A Life
by
88/99
Critics' Rating Index
98/99
Readers' Rating Index
92/99
Scholars' Citation Index
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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
"He has an eye for the telling detail and for setting the scene."
"Eig's book is worthy of its subject."
"Eig does an excellent job of tracing King's interior struggles and self-doubts amid the sudden onslaught of media attention, threats, the bombing of his home and his near-death after being stabbed by a Black woman in Harlem ..."
"Eig enriches his familiar narrative of King's activism with moving stories."
"This book is not as enlightening as Eig likes to think, but he's not the first author to be guilty of overblown self-promotion ..."
"An enthralling reappraisal that confirms King's relevance to today's debates over racial justice."
"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."
"[A] tangled backdrop ..."
"Digging through thousands of hours of telephone transcripts and FBI wiretaps of conversations between King and other political and civil rights leaders, Eig offers an intimate, multidimensional biography."
"Vibrantly written ..."
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