Reviews

I’m extremely conflicted about this book. On the one hand, I think this does a great job at its goal of reshaping the perspective on King from a mythical figure to a noble, but flawed man. On the other hand this feels like it is crafted for successful black capitalists and white people 5 degrees better than the “white moderate.” It feels extremely dismissive of other efforts for civil rights that didn’t involve non violence. It addresses his infidelity, but at the same time seems to be washing it away under the guise of “Coretta knew and accepted it, it’s none of our business,” which would be much easier to take if this book didn’t acknowledge up front its collecting information from unpublished memoirs and diaries.

The book refuses to take the stance that the FBI and US government’s persecution of communists was bad and unjust and therefore almost seems to trip into a belief that persecuting and hunting down communists is totally cool, but King wasn’t one and that that’s why they shouldn’t have been monitoring him like this. And then in its defense of him not being a communist, it then begins to hide his economic politics altogether outside of a few offhand comments made in college days. It is well known that King was a socialist and its a shame that this book does the same thing Nolan’s Oppenheimer did in being so unwilling to defend someone’s right to be a communist/socialist that they just excise that belief from their subject altogether.

If you have already read King biographies, I think that this book will offer nice glimpses of his personal life, but not much more insight into his work. It is certainly not a bad place to start if you aren’t informed on King, but the only people this book would challenge are the people who don’t want to learn about him and certainly not if that requires reading nearly 700 pages on him. This book had a wonderful opportunity to challenge liberals in their complacency as moderates. Instead we get a book where the last three Democratic Party Presidents would be able to read this and say they feel their presidency would’ve been approved by MLK. That’s a problem.