RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewPanoramic and richly insightful ... This biography sets a new standard by giving Lewis’s post-civil-rights story the depth of attention it deserves ... Numerous interviews.
David W. Blight
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review\"... cinematic and deeply engaging ... Douglass cultivated the fiction that he was \'self-made\' and had sprung fully formed from his own forehead. Blight dismantles this pretense in a tour de force of storytelling and analysis, showing that the young orator-to-be had benefited from a great deal of mentorship and good fortune. Viewed through this lens, the fabled escape from slavery takes on different contours ... Blight draws on new archival material and insights gleaned from a lifetime in the company of his subject to shed light on the orator’s complex relationship with his wife, Anna, and the two white women who came between the couple within the walls of the Douglass family home in Rochester.\
David Garrow
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewThis impressive if gratuitously snarly biography is clearly intended to break the 44th president’s monopoly on his personal narrative ... In Garrow’s take-no-prisoners telling, the charismatic president-to-be subordinates his every breath — and his love life — to a politically expedient journey-to-blackness narrative ... Sex sells. But this deeply reported work of biography could easily have done without it. Rising Star seems to include every human being who came within arm’s length of the young president-to-be. The depth of detail allows the reader to see familiar parts of this story with fresh eyes.
Ethan Michaeli
RaveThe New York Times Book Review [Michaeli] developed a love for the ailing paper and for what it and the Negro press had once been. This deeply researched, elegantly written history is a testament to that love. It is also a towering achievement that will not be soon forgotten.
