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 ... It’s a clean, clear, journalistic voice, one that employs facts the way Saul Bellow said they should be employed, each a wire that sends a current. He does not dispense two-dollar words; he keeps digressions tidy and to a minimum; he jettisons weight, on occasion, for speed. He appears to be so in control of his material that it is difficult to second-guess him ... This is a very human, and quite humane, portrait ... Eig is adept at weaving in other characters, and other voices. He makes it plain that King was not acting in a vacuum, and he traces the work of organizations like the N.A.A.C.P., CORE and SNCC ... Eig’s book is worthy of its subject.
Outstanding ... The majority of the book shows who King really was behind the famous speeches and celebrity. 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. His reconstructed dialogues give the reader the feel of being in the room with King and other key players.
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 ... Eig enriches his familiar narrative of King's activism with moving stories.
Readers are given a glimpse of a man who was more complicated and flawed than we’ve seen before. ... The size of King: A Life may be daunting, but don’t let it scare you. It’s a surprisingly fast read that includes things you know and things you don’t know. Truly, you’re going to want to open this book.
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 ...
Eig begins the book with a revealing portrait of 'Daddy King,' Martin Luther King Sr ... Cinematic ... Eig covers the thornier aspects of this period in King’s public life with a light critical touch ... Eig is less circumspect, however, and most telling, in dealing with the messy details and physical and emotional toll of King’s complicated private life ... [A] tangled backdrop ... For all his reporting efforts, however, Eig can’t provide similar access to King’s interior life ... Eig deals only briskly with the complex and evolving rivalry between King and Malcolm X over the years, and devotes scarcely more than 50 pages to those fraught last three years between his detailed reconstructions of the Selma march in 1965 and the assassination at the Lorraine Motel in April 1968.
Brilliant ... Eig’s balanced treatment of King’s manifest greatness and his human flaws, including his sexual infidelity, turns an icon back into a man and produces a biography that will be very difficult to surpass.
Not a demolition job; Eig retains enormous respect for King ... 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 ... Answers remain elusive.
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 ... Strong on narrative but light on analysis. It reflects the strengths of its author, a professional biographer but not a trained historian. It is a pleasure to read. Eig writes with a great economy of style. He has an eye for the telling detail and for setting the scene. He effectively employs novelistic techniques such as shifts in perspective. His account benefits from frequent direct quotations ... Despite his exhaustive research, we learn little that we didn’t know already. King’s story has been told so many times that it is hard to say anything new. We didn’t need a new book to remind us of how significant a figure he was or that he was a flawed and complicated 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 ... Eig takes the time to thoroughly document King’s many affairs – much of which we know about because of the FBI’s relentless surveillance ... At times, Eig’s book does give us hints of a King who might speak directly to our own times – for instance his advocacy of reparations for African Americans for centuries of bondage and oppression, although it is notable that his last effort, the poor people’s march on Washington, sought to recruit Chicanos, Native Americans, white coal miners and other groups to its cause. In general, however, the King we find here is one that previous biographers have charted. Eig’s thoroughly researched account updates their work, but...it mostly traces and deepens the tracks of a familiar story.
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 ... A far more traditional biography, devoting 135 pages, almost a quarter of his text, to King’s pre-boycott roots and life story ... Eig’s King will remain the best-informed account of this deeply courageous, yet also deeply flawed, life.
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’s book offers a fresh examination of King and the swirl of social and political factors that were prevalent in his day.
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 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.
