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Top of the pile
94
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
100/100Critics
88/100Scholars
Author:
Jonathan Eig
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Date:
May 16, 2023
The first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.âand 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.
What The Reviewers Say
The first comprehensive biography of King in three decades. It draws on a landslide of recently released White House telephone transcripts, F.B.I. documents, letters, oral histories and other material, and it supplants David J. Garrow’s 1986 biography Bearing the Cross as the definitive life of King, as Garrow himself deposed recently.
Outstanding.
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.
Readers are given a glimpse of a man who was more complicated and flawed than we’ve seen before..
