Parting the Waters - (America in the King Years) by Taylor Branch (Paperback)

About the Book

Hailed as the most masterful story ever told of the American civil rights movement, Parting the Waters is destined to endure for generations. Branch provides an unsurpassed portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, rise to greatness and illuminates the courage, the deals, betrayals, and rivalries that determined history. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, The Boston Globe, and the Los Angeles Times. (Simon & Schuster)

Book Synopsis

In Parting the Waters, the first volume of his essential America in the King Years series, Pulitzer Prize winner Taylor Branch gives a "compelling...masterfully told" (The Wall Street Journal) account of Martin Luther King's early years and rise to greatness.

Hailed as the most masterful story ever told of the American Civil Rights Movement, Parting the Waters is destined to endure for generations.

Moving from the fiery political baptism of Martin Luther King, Jr., to the corridors of Camelot where the Kennedy brothers weighed demands for justice against the deceptions of J. Edgar Hoover, here is a vivid tapestry of America, torn and finally transformed by a revolutionary struggle unequaled since the Civil War.

Taylor Branch provides an unsurpassed portrait of King's rise to greatness and illuminates the stunning courage and private conflict, the deals, maneuvers, betrayals, and rivalries that determined history behind closed doors, at boycotts and sit-ins, on bloody freedom rides, and through siege and murder.

Epic in scope and impact, Branch's chronicle definitively captures one of the nation's most crucial passages.

Review Quotes

David Levering Lewis The Philadelphia Inquirer Endlessly instructive and fascinating, thorough, stupendous. Now the source and standard in its field.

Garry Wills The New York Review of Books Already, in this chronicle, there is the material of Iliad after Iliad...There is no time in our history of which we can be more proud.

Jim Miller Newsweek A masterpiece ... remarkably revealing.... The past, miraculously, seems to spring back to life.

Richard John Neuhaus The Wall Street Journal A compelling story, masterfully told.

Robert C. Maynard The Washington Post Book World In remarkable, meticulous detail, Branch provides us with the most complex and unsentimental version of King and his times yet produced.

Robert Wilson USA Today Superb history.

About the Author

Taylor Branch is the bestselling author of Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63; Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65; At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968; and The Clinton Tapes. He has won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.