King: A Life by Jonathan Eig

I was not 100% sure that I needed to know more about Martin Luther King, Jr.'s life, but it turns out I was wrong about that. When it turned up on Obama's short summer reading list, I was sold. The author uses a trove of materials—some of them only recently available—augmented with voluminous archival work and hundreds of interviews for personal insights, to advance the already appreciable quantity of first-rate biographies and intensive scholarship on King. There were many things I knew, from the fact that his wife was well aware of his affairs, his tendency to be quick to forgive his own trespasses and slower to show the same to others, and the fact that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI were spying on him--but there is a lot in here that I was unfamiliar with. He also recovers the man, foibles and all, from the too often hollowed-out, sainted symbol that competing ideologies have sanitized for national observance. The book starts with MLK's 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, it's all and paints a thorough picture of King.