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