King : a life /

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

WINNER OF THE 2024 PULITZER PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY

A finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award | Named one of the ten best books of 2023 by The Washington Post , Chicago Tribune , and Time

A New York Times bestseller and notable book of 2023 | One of Barack Obama's favorite books of 2023

One of The New Yorker 's essential reads of 2023 | A Christian Science Monitor best book of the year | One of Air Mail 's twelve best books of 2023

A Washington Post and National Indie Bestseller | One of Publishers Weekly 's best nonfiction books of 2023 | One of Smithsonian magazine's ten best books of 2023

"Supple, penetrating, heartstring-pulling and compulsively readable . . . Eig's book is worthy of its subject." --Dwight Garner, The New York Times (Editors' Choice)

"[ King is] infused with the narrative energy of a thriller . . . The most compelling account of King's life in a generation." --Mark Whitaker, The Washington Post

"No book could be more timely than Jonathan Eig's sweeping and majestic new King . . . Eig has created 2023′s most vital tome." --Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Hailed by The New York Times as "the new definitive biography," King mixes revelatory new research with accessible storytelling to offer an MLK for our times.

Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig's King: 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 times: 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

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Prologue (3)
• 1 The Kings of Stockbridge (9)
• 2 Martin Luther (17)
• 3 Sweet Auburn (25)
• 4 "Black America Still Wears Chains" (42)
• 5 The Open Curtain (53)
• 6 "A Sense of Responsibility" (65)
• 7 The Seminarian (74)
• 8 "Madly Madly in Love" (81)
• 9 The Match (88)
• 10 The Dynamic Force (101)
• 11 Plagiarism and Poetry (107)
• 12 Gideon's Army (113)
• 13 "A Precipitating Factor" (123)
• 14 "My Soul Is Free" (139)
• 15 "We Ain't Rabbit No More" (148)
• 16 A Warning (159)
• 17 Alabama's Moses (177)
• 18 "I'm Glad You Didn't Sneeze" (195)
• 19 The Pilgrimage (208)
• 20 Leaving Montgomery (217)
• 21 "Kennedy to the Rescue!" (234)
• 22 The New Emancipation Proclamation (252)
• 23 Temptation and Surveillance (270)
• 24 "The Stuff Is Just in 'Em" (279)
• 25 Birmingham Jail (293)
• 26 The Dream, Part One (313)
• 27 The Dream, Part Two (328)
• 28 "The Most Dangerous Negro" (340)
• 29 Man of the Year (351)
• 30 A Law Observance Problem (366)
• 31 The Prize (385)
• 32 The Director (392)
• 33 A New Sense of "Some-bodiness" (400)
• 34 Crowbar (404)
• 35 Selma (426)
• 36 "The True Meaning of My Work" (439)
• 37 "A Shining Moment" (447)
• 38 Burning (458)
• 39 Beware the Day (467)
• 40 Chicago (475)
• 41 Black Power (485)
• 42 "I Hope King Gets It" (497)
• 43 "Not an Easy Time for Me" (507)
• 44 A Revolution of Values (522)
• 45 Please Come to Memphis (531)
• Epilogue (553)
• Notes (559)
• Acknowledgments: Beloved Community (633)
• Index (643)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Award-winning biographer and journalist Eig (Ali: A Life) turns his lens on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929--68). 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. He also recovers the man, foibles and all, from the too often hollowed-out, sainted symbol that competing ideologies have sanitized for national observance. His 45 engrossing chapters depict King from his enslaved family's history in antebellum Georgia, his stern father's high expectations, and his soothing mother's calm warmth, through his April 1968 assassination in Memphis. The ambitious, anxious, contemplative, depressed, fun-loving, uncertain private King gets equal attention to the determined, eloquent, fearless public person in the spotlight. From his decrying state-sanctioned and vigilante violence to his stance against the U.S. war in Vietnam and his Poor People's Campaign, Eig notes it all and paints a thorough picture of King. VERDICT A must for readers interested in moving beyond clichéd catchphrases to see a more complete and complex King, the context of his charisma, and the creation and content of his character.--Thomas J. Davis

Publishers Weekly Review

Martin Luther King Jr. went beyond meek nonviolence into far-reaching radicalism, according to this sweeping biography. Eig (Ali: A Life) gives a rousing recap of King's triumphs as a civil rights leader--the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, his "I Have a Dream" speech at the 1963 march on Washington, the 1965 procession from Selma to Montgomery, Ala.--as well as his despondency later in the 1960s as his anti-poverty campaigns struggled and Black energies drifted from nonviolent protest toward armed militance and "Black power." Contesting accusations by Malcolm X and others that King was an "Uncle Tom," Eig casts him as a revolutionary who reshaped the South with his integrationism, became an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War despite losing political support and drawing the ire of the FBI, and developed a deep critique of systemic racism and economic inequality that called for reparations for slavery and a guaranteed minimum income. King is no saint in this complex, nuanced portrait--his plagiarism and womanizing are probed in detail--but Eig's evocative prose ably conveys his bravery, charisma, and spell-binding oratory (rallying the Montgomery boycotters, "he called out in his deep, throbbing voice, and the people responded, the noise of the crowd rolling and pounding in waves that shook the building as he built to a climax"). It's an enthralling reappraisal that confirms King's relevance to today's debates over racial justice. Agent: David Black, David Black Literary. (May)

Booklist Review

Eig (Ali, 2017) has a dream that Americans will remember more about our most famous civil rights icon than one, partially improvised speech. In the most comprehensive MLK biography to date, enhanced with newly released FBI records and unpublished memoirs, Eig digs deep into King's family history, revealing the fortitude and racial trauma experienced by his grandparents and the indomitable church culture which forged his father. MLK Junior and Senior were devoted to each other yet clashed over doctrine and morality and disagreed over the role of the church and of clergy in social justice movements. Eig notes the influence of Morehouse College in strengthening King's sense of Black self-worth and identity and of colleagues (and rivals) like Ralph Abernathy in developing King's own theology of antiracism. Eig insightfully and forthrightly addresses critiques of King as a plagiarist and his relationships with women before and after his marriage to Coretta Scott. Most important, Eig refuses to "defang" King, instead pushing Americans to recognize the radical nature of his demands for justice and his resistance to not only racism but also militarism and capitalism. "Today his words might help us make our way through these troubled times, but only if we actually read them, only if we embrace the complicated King, the flawed King, the human King, the radical King."

Kirkus Book Review

Definitive life of the champion of civil rights. Having placed Muhammad Ali in the canon of civil rights leaders with his 2017 biography, Eig turns to Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968) in a monumental biography. He did not begin life with that name: His parents "named him Michael King, no middle name, no initial, no 'Junior.' They called him Little Mike." Though small, he was a scrapper on the football field and basketball court, a smart and serious student who entered Morehouse College early and, having traveled north on a work program and seen the magic of desegregation, became committed to civil rights. The name change, writes the author, "was clinched during a 1934 trip to Germany, where King learned more about the sixteenth-century German friar." King first forged the battle for civil rights in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955; in the 13 years he had left, he galvanized that struggle, carefully planning campaigns while refining his skills by, among other things, visiting India to study the nonviolent tactics of Gandhi. Though King "was a man, not a saint, not a symbol," he was viewed both positively and negatively as the most important advocate of Black rights--a program he would expand to include an anti--Vietnam War platform and a widening effort to end poverty worldwide. That spread him thin, but not enough to elude the obsessive hatred of J. Edgar Hoover, who "saw King as the ultimate disrupter of societal norms." That he was, even if he was seen as too conservative by some Black militants and too radical by many Whites. Unlike biographers hitherto denied access, Eig examined recently released FBI files to show that there is no evidence that King was a communist operative, as Hoover alleged, though the files do show "the extent and determination of the bureau's campaign to thwart King." An extraordinary achievement and an essential life of the iconic warrior for social justice. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Jonathan Eig is a former senior writer for The Wall Street Journal. He is the New York Times bestselling author of five books, including Ali: A Life , Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig , and Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season . Ken Burns calls him "a master storyteller," and Eig's books have been listed among the best of the year by The Washington Post , Chicago Tribune , Sports Illustrated , and Slate . He lives in Chicago with his wife and children.