Rate this book

Death Of A King: The Real Story Of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Final Year (2014)

by Tavis Smiley(Favorite Author)

4.15 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0316332763 (ISBN13: 9780316332767)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Little, Brown and Company

review 1: I was very disappointed. Mr. Smiley could have done a much better job, given how interesting his subject was and the wealth of living sources of information. Instead, we get a skipping stone over the surface of a story which deserves much better. Given Mr. Smiley's professed lifelong study of his subject, I was expecting something of Shakespearian proportions: a gifted, troubled man, driven yet hesitant. His friends and allies fall away, or beg and even extort him to compromise his message. This is a tale of great depth and tragedy, about a brilliant man whose message wasn't really simple enough to "sell," so he is forced to oversimplify it and thereby eviscerate it. Sounds pretty damn Shakespearian to me. In the right hands, this would have been a book for the ... moreages.
review 2: It makes me chuckle that the best person this country ever produced still had to sneak around to smoke his Salems.This book reviews the last year of Martin's life from April 4, '67 when he denounced the Vietnam War in the Riverside Church and called America the greatest purveyor of violence in the world to April 4, '68 when he was shot at the Lorraine Motel. In this year he was unpopular not just with the racists who hated him and the liberal establishment that thought he had lost his way, but also the black radicals who saw non-violence as passé and passive.One reaction I had was how natural it was for Martin to speak in public using the vocabulary of Christian faith and Christian holiness and Christian responsibility. Today, it seems harder to presume everyone shares that vocabulary. But Martin used it powerfully to demand accountability to respond to poverty and create economic justice and we sure need more ways to talk about that, less

Download links for: Death of a King: The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Final Year

Advertising