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..

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..

Might be described as a deeply reported psychobiography, an attempt to reconcile Garrow’s sinner with Branch’s saint, infused with the narrative energy of a thriller.

Brilliant.

Not a demolition job; Eig retains enormous respect for King.

Comprehensive.

Eig’s compulsively readable new biography could hardly be more timely. Though it does not contain many new revelations, the book is the most accessible and balanced biography of this great man.

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.

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.

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.

Eig writes like an Olympic diver who jackknifes off the high board, slicing the water without a ripple. He performs with sheer artistry..

Vibrantly written.

Mining a trove of materials—many only recently available—augmented with voluminous archival work and hundreds of interviews for personal insights, Eig advances the already appreciable quantity of first-rate biographies and intensive scholarship on King.

A monumental biography.

Sweeping.