Join LILRC as we welcome Jonathan Eig to discuss his book, King: A Life, one of ten nominees in nonfiction for the National Book Award<\/p>\n
\u201cVividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig\u2019s King: A Life is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.\u2015and 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\u2019s origins as well as MLK\u2019s 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\u2015as well as the nation\u2019s most mourned martyr.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s greatest movements, and whose demands for racial and economic justice remain as urgent today as they were in his lifetime.\u201d<\/p>\n