PRAISE FOR
AT CANAAN'S EDGE

James T. Patterson, The Washington Post
At Canaan's Edge is a deeply researched book that completes a superior narrative trilogy of America's civil rights struggles between 1954 and 1968.

Publishers Weekly
The engrossing final installment of Branch's three-volume biography of Martin Luther King Jr. maintains the high standards set in the previous volumes, the first of which won a Pulitzer Prize. Moving from the protest at Selma and the 1966 Meredith March through King's expanding political concern for the poor to his 1968 assassination in Memphis, Tenn., Branch gives us not only the civil rights leader's life but also the rapidly changing pulse of American culture and politics. The America we find in this last chapter of King's life is on fire--the Republican Party has begun to court white Southern voters; the Civil Rights movement itself has fractured; King sees bold challenges to his teaching of nonviolence in the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles. King himself has evolved, spreading his interests beyond civil rights to become a more outspoken critic of the Vietnam War and of poverty. A turning point in King's legacy, says Branch, was his housing actions in Chicago in the summer of 1966. This work "nationalized race," showing that it wasn't just a Southern problem, and ensured that King would go down in history as much more than a regional leader. As a literary work, Branch's biography is masterful. About midway through, the author begins to foreshadow King's death--by, for example, quoting his 1965 statement to a filmmaker: "I would willingly give my life for that which I think is right." If Branch indulges in predictable throat clearing about the lessons from King's life that endure in America today--well, that is to be expected. This magisterial book is a fitting tribute to a magisterial man. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal
Moving from the Selma march to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Branch completes his Pulitzer Prize-winning study of the Civil Rights Movement. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

PRAISE FOR
PILLAR OF FIRE

From The Wall Street Journal, David M. Shribman
...a powerful, surprising argument, never explicitly stated but implicitly clear, holding that the rebellions against the established order--which took their form in the civil-rights movement, the youth movement, the early stirrings of the women's movement and the middle class's changing self-definition through the 1960s--were inextricably linked.... It is Mr. Branch's achievement to display how the civil-rights pressures and the Cold War pressures were intertwined.

From The New York Times Book Review, Alan Wolfe
As he did in Parting the Waters, Branch brings to these events both a passion for their detail and a recognition of their larger historical significance. By giving King such epic treatment, Branch implies that he was an epic hero. Was he? The great merit of Branch's stunning accomplishment is to prove definitively that he was.

From The Philadelphia Inquirer, Herman Graham 3d
Read Pillar of Fire for its detailed and captivating description of Sixties figures and ecumenical activism, but you will have to wait for the final volume of Branch's trilogy to understand how Dr. King personified postwar America.

From Slate, David Greenberg
The great strength of this book is the way Branch zooms in on the dozens of local skirmishes, from Greenwood, Miss., to St. Augustine, Fla., through which the movement's shock troops waged their nonviolent campaigns…. though he amply covers the higher-stakes political events, he never allows them to eclipse his larger story: farmers and teachers, sharecroppers and dentists, prying their freedom loose from the grip of segregationist whites--and in so doing stripping away the racist restrictions that had always made the achievements of American democracy ring hollow.

From The Economist
Rejecting continuity and ignoring chronology, it is an interwoven fabric of narratives, some of them quite new, many of them fascinating....

From Booklist, January 1, 1998
Comprehensiveness does not necessarily mean readability, and it certainly does not mean it here in the second volume of Branch's proposed trilogy on the civil rights era in U.S. history, following Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 (1989). Although the previous volume was a best-seller and won the Pulitzer Prize--and for those reasons this follow-up volume will be in demand in libraries--readers will have to be dedicated to the subject to wade through this unimaginatively presented assemblage of facts. Branch's research is impeccable and his knowledge of his material solid as he focuses on the civil rights movement's "peak years," when, beginning with the campaign in Alabama, Martin Luther King Jr. took strides forward in his program to deliver equality to his race. But the prose is so airless, the reader will gasp for breath as the author chronicles King's struggles within his own movement for leadership, struggles within the entire black community for direction in achieving racial fairness, and confrontations with the federal government, particularly the FBI. The book is significant for marshaling so much information, particularly the profiles of all the many individuals involved in the race issues of that time, but it lacks fluidity. Brad Hooper
Copyright© 1998, American Library Association. All rights reserved.

From Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 1998
In this stirring follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning Parting the Waters (1988), Branch recalls the terror, dissension, and courage of the civil-rights movement at its zenith: the mid- 1960s agitation leading to landmark integration and voting-rights legislation. With deft narrative skill, Branch shows how the lives of individuals and the nation as a whole were transformed in such diverse settings as Birmingham, Ala., where legendary protests occurred; the LBJ White House; and South Central L.A., where a 1962 shooting involving police and Black Muslims signaled the start of a decade of urban tensions. Memoirs, oral histories, interviews, and recently revealed FBI wiretaps enable Branch to trace the inexorable momentum of change almost day by day. He also details the overlapping goals, tactical disputes, and petty jealousies among and within major movement organizations, including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the NAACP. Straddling a narrative filled with a novel's-worth of fascinating real-life characters are two spellbinding, tormented figures epitomizing two poles of protest: Martin Luther King Jr., unnerved by FBI surveillance of his philandering, so resentful of Kennedy caution over civil-rights advocacy that he cracked an obscene joke while watching the president's funeral, yet winning a Nobel Peace Prize; and Malcolm X, shattered by his discovery that mentor Elijah Muhammad had impregnated several secretaries, attempting on the fly to plot a new course away from the Nation of Islam before his assassination. Finally, Branch foreshadows the forces and events that were to stall the movement in the next few years: a Republican Party making inroads in the South during Barry Goldwater's otherwise disastrous campaign, the alienation of white liberals from militant blacks, and the Vietnam War. With a third volume to come, this history is taking pride of place among the dozens of fine chronicles of this time of tumult and moral witness in American history. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Jack Patterson, Newsweek
At the conclusion of Parting the Waters, his Pulitzer-prize winning 1988 book about Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil-rights movement, Taylor Branch offered some somber reflections. By the end of 1963, King had traveled a tortuous path from the obscurity of his Montgomery (Ala.) church to worldwide fame. The lunch-counter sit-ins, the Freedom Rides that sought to integrate interstate bus travel, police violence in Birmingham, the March on Washington, and the murder of John F. Kennedy were in the past. Ahead lay a widening struggle, said Branch: ''Nonviolence had come over him for a purpose that far transcended segregation. Having lifted him up among rulers, it would drive him back down to die among garbage workers in Memphis. King had crossed over as a patriarch like Moses into a land less bounded by race. To keep going, he became a pillar of fire.''

That phrase--a reference to the flame that, in the Book of Exodus, guides the Israelites from Egypt--is now the title of a second, painstakingly researched and broadly focused volume in what Branch projects as a trilogy. Judging only by the two published works, Branch has already written an indispensable account not just of King but of the events that he shaped and was shaped by.

Pillar of Fire is not light reading. Its complex, often-ugly story is also compelling and ultimately inspiring. Over 600, fact-filled pages (plus 91 pages of notes) are devoted to only three years, 1963-65, the crest of the civil-rights movement in the South. Branch knits together a staggering range of events and themes: the explosive Freedom Summer in Mississippi; political twists and turns in Washington; the expanding Vietnam war; the rise and fall of Malcolm X; and King's frequent doubts and uncertainty about what to do next.

The story retains its power to shock. Branch describes, for example, the unremitting brutality of local sheriffs in Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. Blacks and their white supporters were repeatedly clubbed and jailed, their houses, stores, churches, and synagogues bombed and burned. The Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964--during which hundreds of students poured into the state to take part in voter-registration drives--reached a horrendous climax when three young men, one local black and two white Northern volunteers, were murdered. This violence went on year after year, even after Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The FBI calculated that over a five-year period in southwest Mississippi, the Ku Klux Klan committed 9 murders, 75 church burnings, and at least 300 bombings and assaults.

Almost equally shocking was the stubborn short-sightedness of white leaders who gave police and vigilantes free rein. Gradually, these leaders, including businesspeople worried about economic damage to their communities, came to see that allowing black children to be beaten while the national press looked on was self-defeating.

More upsetting personally are the book's appalling quotes from FBI tapes of King taking part in sexual liaisons in various hotel rooms. That such tapes existed is known to many, but seeing the obscene words in cold print dismays and saddens.

Then there's the sordid story behind these tapes. Over many years, the FBI wiretapped King's home and office phones and put bugs in his hotel rooms. It was all part of a merciless campaign against King waged by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI constantly sought to undermine King with supporters, deny him awards and honorary degrees, and even sabotage an audience with Pope Paul VI. Its vendetta culminated in a package of tapes and other material, together with an ''anonymous'' letter urging King to commit suicide, that was sent to reporters, political and religious leaders, and King himself.

From this tumultuous background, King emerges as a heroic but deeply human figure, struggling frequently with depression, even despair. He won the loyalty of many but faced opposition at every turn, including within the movement. Roy Wilkins, head of the NAACP, for example, favored attacking racial discrimination in the courts and disliked sit-ins and demonstrations, which he felt yielded few results and angered potential white allies. On the left, King faced hostile fire from the more radical Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

King knew he could not avoid hard decisions. He recognized, for example, that most Americans tended to see racial discrimination as synonymous with Southern segregation--something fewer and fewer people were inclined to support. King knew these were not the only issues: As early as 1964, he was convinced that he must venture into Northern cities and take on the thornier matters of discrimination in jobs and housing. The risks, he knew, were great.

But doubts and worries did not turn King from his course. Committed and courageous, he drew strength from his conviction that nonviolent resistance would overcome both hatred and indifference. As the book closes, King is in Selma, preparing to lead the march to Montgomery that would confront Governor George Wallace. King has three more years to live, during which he stands, in Branch's words, ''at Canaan's edge.'' That, we are told, will be the title of the third and final volume of this magisterial work.

From Charles Taylor, Salon
The title tells you everything you need to know. "America in the King Years," Taylor Branch's three-volume biography of Martin Luther King Jr., of which the new "Pillar of Fire" is the second installment, declares its ambition and conviction: Ambition to encompass far more than just King's life, and conviction that King, more than any other figure, shaped American life from the mid-'50s to the late '60s. Branch has embarked on an epic work that shows every sign of being equal to the moral, emotional and narrative complexity of the civil rights struggle, and "Pillar of Fire" can stand alongside the first volume, "Parting the Waters," as one of the greatest achievements in American biography.

As Branch tells it, the movement's struggle continues to feel like the best story in American history. Perhaps because it's our nakedest moment, the time when large numbers of Americans, barely recognized as such by sanctioned power, dared to dream of what the country could be at its best, in the face of what it often was at its worst.

"Pillar of Fire" captures King and the civil rights movement at a fulcrum. The moments of highest triumph and widest influence following the March on Washington, the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and King's winning of the Nobel Peace Prize were also the times the movement faced the greatest violence, epitomized by the Mississippi murders of Goodman, Cheyney and Schwerner during Freedom Summer. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was also riven by an internal conflict over whether to stay true to its grass-roots beginnings or to become a slick political organization; Malcolm X was sowing doubts about the legitimacy of nonviolence; and Stokely Carmichael was shortly to introduce the concept of "Black Power." The territory Branch has to cover here is killingly large. Sometimes he abandons a thread when we want him to move on to a climax, and sometimes his clauses are a tad more convoluted than they need to be. But this is a remarkable job of clarity wrestled from massive detail.

"Pillar of Fire" extends the sympathy and piercing intelligence of the previous volume's psychological portrait of King. Branch also navigates the maddening and deeply moving contradictions of Malcolm X, and what can only be described as the cravenness of JFK. Terrified of losing the South, Kennedy relentlessly put politics first and stayed true to his narrow Cold War ethos by warning King of communist "infiltration" in the movement. But perhaps the most important part of Branch's book is his detailing of J. Edgar Hoover's surveillance of King, and the FBI's various disgusting smear tactics, including sending a package to King containing a tape with evidence of his extramarital affairs accompanied by a note suggesting he kill himself before the tape's contents become known. This material isn't new, but it feels revelatory here because it's been laid out as part of a narrative.

Given what the official channels of government and power brought to bear against the civil rights movement, and given what a sad story Branch is telling and our knowledge of what awaits at the end of the final volume, it's amazing that, reading it, you can still hear clearly the sweet transcendence of the freedom songs and mass meetings he describes. You come to the end of this volume weary, scarcely believing there can be more to come, and hungry for Branch's next volume.

PRAISE FOR
PARTING THE WATERS

From Library Journal
A tour de force of research and synthesis, richer than any extant King biography or civil rights history, this will be the measure of all books to come.

From Charles McGrath, The New York Times Book of the Century:
....Mr. Branch's book deepens, expands and fulfills the memories of many of us and the history of a time of great change in the nation.

From Library Journal:
Branch continues his acclaimed trilogy on the Civil Rights era, begun with Parting the Waters (LJ 1/89).

From Eleanor Holmes Norton, The New York Times Book Review: (This work) is least successful when it attempts to be more than a history of the movement. Its references to major unrelated events of the period, such as the Hungarian revolt or the Suez crisis, are necessarily disconnected from the stories of the struggle for civil rights and become mere intermissions to the main attraction. Mr. Branch's burden--to cover, and bring together the scattered impressions that convey a movement--is awesome enough. Adding to the mix the nuances of the nation's history proved impossible. . . . Although Mr. Branch makes few harsh judgments, this is not a book about saints. It is a set of compelling portraits, placed in the excitement of a period when oppressed and powerless people moving together changed themselves and their country profoundly and permanently.

From Jim Miller, Newsweek:
Going far beyond David J. Garrow, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning King biography, Bearing the Cross, (BRD 1987) focuses primarily on politics, Branch offers a compelling approach to King as a moral and religious leader. Perhaps Branch's decisive improvement on Garrow is the stress he places on the black church--a largely invisible world to most white Americans that Branch evokes as few writers before. . . . As few writers can, Branch creates the illusion of reality. Deeply skeptical of those with power and suspicious of the anodyne gloss they put on events as they happen, Branch--in this regard, a model new historian--has searched out the hidden reality and often tragic human drama of the King years. On his best pages, the past, miraculously, seems to spring back to life. King himself appears human, all too human. Yet when the reader is done, his remarkable virtues and ordinary vices seem of a piece, the component parts of a coherent, towering personality.

From R.Z. Sheppard, Time:
The personalities of the men and women who organized and led the Freedom Riders and lunch-counter sit-ins are drawn with clarity and perception. The battle cry 'We shall overcome' often takes on subtle meanings that illustrate the complexities of courageous acts. . . . Branch reinforces an already persuasive case that (J. Edgar)Hoover used his files to manipulate both (Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy), as well as Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who needed to protect his brother from scandal.