This is how history should be written (6 stars)

books:

	• Parting the Waters Simon & Schuster, 1988 average customer review:based on 37 reviews
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highly recommended

Reading my own history

I grew up during the times reviewed in this book. It rankles somewhat to find how little I knew of my own "history". If you are a "end-of-the-curve-baby-boomer," I recommend this book to you without reservation.

Illuminating and Compelling

I can't say enough good things about this book by Taylor Branch. With other Pulitzer Prize winning books (like Guns of August) you may ponder, "How did this ever win the top prize for literature?," but with "Parting the Waters," the answer comes immediately apparent that it is deserving of accolades upon accolades. An understanding of 20th century America is incomplete without reading Branch's book on the early Civil Rights movement.

What Branch does so well is write compelling narrative that leaves the book hard to put down. He makes a 922 page book seem much much shorter, which reading that length of a book would mostly be a labor of love to finish otherwise. What he also does brilliantly is to open up the context of the Civil Rights movement to the major events on the world stage and developments of the time. Instead of looking at the Civil Rights movement under a microscope, Branch brings in the Cuban Missile Crisis, popular culture, and so much more to help frame those events and that time.

It is hard to understand the amount of hatred in parts of our country during that time but Branch's book brings it out in shockingly brutal details. To understand what our country went through a scant half century ago, helps illuminate race relations today. We owe a great debt to the leaders of the civil rights movement for being extremely brave, many times to the point of giving their lives, to bring about needed social change in America. After reading Branch's account of the beginning of the Civil Rights movement, it struck me that those years were nothing short of a war, a revolution, fought through peaceful means against all odds.

The reading of this book will leave you changed, liberal and conservative alike. It has reached elevated status of my all time favorite book list...and I have read a few. Everyone should read this book in a lifetime.
--MMW

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This is how history should be written (6 stars)

Few books on any subject merit or can sustain 3,000 pages, but this first part of the trilogy is so compelling, so fascinating, so well written that 3,000 pages may not be enough.

This is how history should be written, with the facts creating the emotion, and the personalities highlighting the events. A compelling perspecitive on our shared history with unflinching insight into Dr. King's life and how he affected us all.

Required reading.

Required reading

This book should be a required reading in every college and university across America. This is not Civil rights history nor Black history, but American History. The reading is dense, but this is not a bad thing because there is so much to learn. Branch does a wonderful job in focusing and including the many people involved in, arguably, the most important times in America. At times it will weigh on your heart, and at times it gives hope.

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King: Spiritual leader of our time

In reading this book, you will believe in the power of prayer, bear witness to miracles, marvel at overlapping destinies, and give thanks for accidents of history. You also will be humbled and inspired by the spiritual life and public work of Dr. Martin Luther King.

Author Branch presents an enormous cast of characters and complicated interweaving storylines to tell the amazing story of the civil rights movement at a time when the country was struggling to integrate the moral momentum of WWII into a domestic reconciliation on race. By making King the main road through which all things pass, the huge story stays on track and remains a story of human, instead of political, dimensions.

King was a dreamer and a pragmatic strategist. But many of his most illuminating moments came from unexpected or desperate places such as his first movement speech in the early days of the Montgomery bus boycott or his "Letter From a Birmingham Jail." Branch shows how the movement drew more power from epiphanies and spontaneous acts than it did from planned insurrections. That passion of the human spirit to right the world, as exemplified by Dr. King, frames this story.

Even though we all know the history of the boycotts, the sit-ins, the marches, the voter registration drives, and the Freedom Rides, Branch writes so forcefully and knowledgeably about the people, that it comes alive all over again. The outcome seems uncertain despite us knowing the ending which is what makes the stories in this book living history.

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reviews: 1, 2, page 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

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