Praise for MALCOLM X: A LIFE OF REINVENTION
By Manning Marable
(Viking; Embargoed; Strict On Sale Date: April 4, 2011; ISBN: 978-0-670-02220-5; $30.00)
“It will be difficult for anyone to better this book. It goes deeper and richer than a mere homage to Malcolm X. It is a work of art, a feast that combines genres skillfully: biography, true-crime, political commentary. It gives us Malcolm X in full gallop, a man who died for his belief in freedom, a man whom Marable calls the ‘fountainhead’ of the black power movement in America.” —The Washington Post
“In his revealing and prodigiously researched new biography,
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, Manning Marable — a professor at
Columbia University and the director of its Center for Contemporary Black History,
who died just last week — vividly chronicles these many incarnations of his subject. . . Mr. Marable artfully strips away the layers and layers of myth that have been lacquered onto his subject’s life — first by Malcolm himself in that famous memoir, and later by both supporters and opponents after his assassination in 1965 at the age of 39. — Michiko Kakutani,
The New York Times
“Unlike Bruce Perry’s 1991 biography, Malcolm, which entertained the most outlandish stories in an attempt to present a comprehensive portrait, Marable’s biography judiciously sifts fact from myth.” —The Atlantic
“His [Marable’s] work of scraping away accreted layers of myth to show the complex, conflicted figure of Malcolm X was needed not only for history’s sake, but as an antidote to the twin maladies of demonization and hero worship.” —Boston Globe
“This book is a must read.” —Ebony
“Thankfully, we have Manning Marable's new biography, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention — which is, simply put, a stunning achievement — to help us better understand Malcolm’s complex life.” —The Philadelphia Tribune
“The book also has much to recommend it for its history of orthodox Islam, the perspective it offers on the black political movements of the 1950s and 1960s that changed America, and its insights into the development and inner workings of the Nation of Islam.” —The Financial Times
“Manning Marable’s scholarship was as provocative and profound as it was prodigious.” —Newsday
“The Malcolm book stands as the greatest testament we could have to Manning Marable’s brilliance, his passion, and his intellectual fortitude. He devoted his magnificent career—more than most scholars do—to living what he wrote and what he thought. His commitment not only to equality of opportunity but also to the exposure of falsehood and hypocrisy was a hallmark of his pathbreaking work.” —The Chronicle of Higher Education
“Marable accomplishes the difficult task of showing the bad boy of the civil rights era as an actual human being . . . Each page almost secretes the formidable research into hard facts. Marable lets the chips fall where they may because he is interested in the humanity of Malcolm X, as all true scholars should be.” —New York Daily News
“The poet Robert Hayden once captured the essence of Malcolm X's life in a paradox: ‘He rose renewed renamed, became / much more than there was time for him to be.’ Nowhere is this more apparent than in Marable's biography. This is history at its finest—written with passion and attention and drive. It is a fitting testament to the lives and the legacies of both subject and author.” —TheBarnesandNobleReview.com
“It will be difficult for anyone to better this book. It’s deeper and richer than a mere homage to Malcolm X. It is a work of art, a feast that combines genres skillfully: biography, true crime, political commentary. It gives us Malcolm X in full gallop, a man who died for his belief in freedom, a man whom Marable calls the ‘fountainhead’ of the black power movement in America.” —Truthdig.com
“Marable’s definitive biography is now the standard by which scholars can evaluate, not just what Malcolm X said, but what generations of others have said about him.” —The National
“This book is not the only representation of Manning's brilliance, however. Rather, it is a culmination of a lifetime of scholarship and activism, a larger project devoted to telling the stories of a people engaged in an epic, painful and beautiful struggle for freedom. That story had no better chronicler, that struggle no greater champion than Manning Marable.” —BlackVoices.com
“This superbly perceptive and resolutely honest book will long endure as a definitive treatment of Malcolm’s life, if not of the actors complicit in his death.”—The Wilson Quarterly
“The book is cause for celebration . . . The book is full of revelations, big and small, and amounts to a full-on reconsideration of Malcolm’s life and death. Marable struggled heroically to finish it; saddened as we were by the news of his death, we’re glad that he lived long enough to hold it in his hands.” —VeryShortList.com
Praise for Manning Marable
“As Malcolm lived on through his best-selling autobiography, so will Marable, through his unmatched body of writing, his educational contributions, his illuminations on Malcolm X's legacy and his devoted students.” —CNN.Com
“Manning was an unflinching and breathtakingly prolific scholar whose commitments to racial, economic, gender, and international justice were unparalleled . . . That we will have his long-anticipated, great and final work even as he leaves us is so classically, tragically appropriate. Manning would never leave us without one more contribution, one more trail blazed, one more bar raised, one more possibility realized, one last drink from the great well of himself.”—
The Nation
“While Marable himself is irreplaceable, he has provided a foundation for future generations and will continue to shape our understanding of social change and justice.” —TheRoot.com
“A prolific scholar.” —The Columbia Record
