Martin Luther King /

British journalist and author Hodgson recounts the life of Martin Luther King Jr. from his birth in 1929 to his assassination in 1968, touching on the major high and low points of King's activism and personal life. Hodgson, who has written several books on American politics, examines the racial landscape of the U.S. and how King coped with, challenged, and eventually changed it. Hodgson explores King's transformation from a Southern Baptist preacher to a national civil rights leader and international peace and human-rights activist. He recounts King's relationships with other civil rights figures, including Ralph Abernathy, Bayard Rustin, Ella Baker, and leftist Stanley Levison. He chronicles the successful and failed strategies, the tensions between King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the more assertive Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee as younger generations challenged the slow pace of change, as well as the stress of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI surveillance. Hodgson offers no new insights or deep analysis, but his viewpoint as a British journalist who interviewed King on several occasions from 1956 to 1967 adds an interesting perspective.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2010 Booklist

Martin Luther King has been the subject of many lengthy and richly detailed accounts, such as Taylor Branch's three-volume "America in the King Years" series and David Garrow's Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King and the Christian Leadership Conference. Hodgson (The Myth of American Exceptionalism), one of Great Britain's keenest observers of American politics, here offers a most welcome brief account of King and his times. Hodgson is best at describing King's adult life as a series of struggles: leading the Civil Rights Movement from the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott through the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers' strike; confronting turmoil within the Civil Rights Movement among King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the radical Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the more conservative NAACP and Urban League; and fearing assassination as a daily threat, battling Presidents Kennedy and Johnson over legislation, and his philandering that could have destroyed the nonviolent movement. Verdict This excellent, short biography is ideal for high school and college students and for general readers who want a concise overview of King's life and legacy.-Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.