Good Reads: "King: A Life"

Book 28 of 2025 (Sept. 28 to Oct. 13) was a near-masterpiece of biography writing. I picked up my copy at The Next Chapter in Jasper — and you should too (have them order it if it's not there).

"King: A Life" by Jonathan Eig

Non-Fiction, Biography

On the next-to-last page of the epilogue of "King: A Life" by Jonathan Eig, the author writes what is probably the most profound sentence in the book (I highlighted it in an otherwise unmarked book). 

"But in hallowing King we have hollowed him."

Eig's work detailing the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — the winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Biography — is among the most captivating biographies I have ever had the pleasure of reading — but it was also often tough to read about King, the man, when you've primarily known of King, the myth.

In a prophetic tradition, King was a Moses-like figure in modern American history. He led an extraordinary movement for human rights and called for America to fulfill the promise established in our founding documents (that "all men are created equal"). He was also a man who was mercilessly hounded by the Hoover-led FBI and JFK/LBJ-era government, ridiculed by both white and black activists — as well as everyday people — of his day, cheated on his wife more regularly, was a workaholic who was not entirely present in his children's lives as he placed the mission above his home, and struggled mightily with feelings of guilt, depression, and failure, especially in the final year of his life. In other words, like Moses, he was entirely human.

Eig doesn't shy away from the failures in King's life, but he also celebrates his triumphs. Chapter 27's recounting of The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (aka the "I Have A Dream" speech) is fairly breathtaking in its account. Reading the soaring, prophetic (not in the sense of telling the future, but calling to righteousness, justice, and faithfulness) words of King's speeches and sermon more than once brought tears to my eyes. Eig masterfully weaves all parts of King's life together and it's easy to see why the book was so lauded upon its release in 2024.

There are many things to discuss in the book, including the way history may not repeat, but definitely rhymes. ("The Yale historian C. Vann Woodward wrote in Harper's Magazine that the civil rights movement seemed to be following the same course as Reconstruction: "a rising tide of indignation against an ancient wrong, the slow crumbling of stubborn resistance, the sudden rush and elation of victory — and then ... the onset of reaction and the fading of high hopes." (p. 508)).

Eig writes this in his closing thoughts on the final page: "Where do we go from here? In spite of the way America treated him, King still had faith when he asked that question. Today, his words might help us make our way through these troubled times, but only if we actually read them; only if we embrace the complicated King, the flawed King, the human King, the radical King; only if we see and hear him clearly again, as America saw and heard him once before. "Our very survival," he wrote, "depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant and to face the challenge of change."

Every year in January, Americans of all shapes and sizes, colors and creeds quote Martin Luther King Jr., especially on social media, but most of us have little idea who he really was — even if we were alive at the time — and the context in which he spoke and preached. We have little idea that he felt called by God to lead this movement for equality (a "call" he received at a humble kitchen table in Montgomery, Alabama). We have little idea of the tremendous toil he endured in his 39 short years of life. We have little idea of the many flaws he had. We (present company included until now) have little idea because we know a myth and not a man.

To more fully understand, I would urge anyone to read Eig's biography of King, perhaps the best book I have — or will — read in 2025, or possibly in years to come.