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Ntfs_encryption
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Ntfs_encryption
Post Number: 350
Registered: 10-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, July 08, 2006 - 09:53 pm: | 
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Has anyone picked up Taylor Branches engrossing final installment of three-volume biography of Martin Luther King Jr.( At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68)? The man has maintained his scholarly and detailed high standards that dominate his two previous volumes (the first, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 won a Pulitzer Prize). Moving from the protest at Selma and the 1966 Meredith March through King's expanding political concern for the poor to his 1968 assassination in Memphis, Tenn., he gives us not only the civil rights leader's life but also the rapidly changing pulse of American culture and politics. The America we find in this last chapter of King's life is on fire—the Republican Party has begun to court white Southern voters; the Civil Rights movement itself has fractured; King sees bold challenges to his teaching of nonviolence in the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles. And anyone who remembers, King himself evolved, spreading his interests beyond civil rights to become a more outspoken critic of the Vietnam War and of poverty. I personally believe that lead to the stepped up attacks by his detractors and fueled the fires for J. Edger Hoovers pathological obsession to destroy him. If you have not checked any of this three works out, I highly suggest that you do. In fact, he was on CSPAN Booknotes a few months ago for a three hour show. It was awesome! I loved it!
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Yvettep
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Yvettep
Post Number: 1094
Registered: 01-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, July 09, 2006 - 03:47 pm: |
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Thanks so much, Ntfs, for the info about his appearance on Booknotes. On the website I only saw this program from 98: http://www.booknotes.org/Program/?ProgramID=1408. But I think it may be the one you're talking about because I do not think C-Span is actively producing any new Booknotes programs.
I have read Pillar and hope to get to the other two at some point. In the meantime, I'm going to check out the Booknotes program. |
Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 4810
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, July 09, 2006 - 07:36 pm: |
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I lived through this era, as both a participant and a spectator. I took part in some of the Vietnam protests, witnessing how MLK ruffled the feathers of the the military establishment when he referred to Viet Nam as an adventure that should come to an end by bringing our boys back home. I mourned the death of both him and Malcolm X, but I never realized the significance of the Reagan era until I looked back on it. I was just kinda carried along with what was going on but not drastically affected by it and I never got the feeling that Reagan was a great leader who was instrumental in bringing the cold war to an end as is now being claimed. To me he was always kind of a bemused figure who was greatly skewered by comics of the day. I do rememeber thinking that King had started to come across as a little weary but seemed to me to remain comfortable in his role as a black leader in spite of his detractors among the black militants. |
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