Daily Times

This dual biography of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King upends longstanding preconceptions to transform people’s understanding of the 20th century’s most iconic African American leaders. This is a “strikingly revisionist biography, not only of Malcolm and Martin, but also of the movement and era they came to define,” according to critics. In a review for The New York Times, Annette Gordon-Reed said the author argues for a “new interpretation” of the two leaders. The review said King and Malcolm X “may have been polar opposites at the start of their time in the public eye, but they had moved toward each other by the time their lives on the public stage were ended, both by an assassin’s bullet. King would die at the hands of a member of a race to whom he had reached out with an offer of friendship, Malcolm X at the hands of men of the race in whom he had put so much faith and trust.” Joseph’s depiction makes clear that both men believed themselves indispensable to the black struggle. Their instinct for leadership pushed them to their physical limits, as they worked and traveled near nonstop, to the detriment of family life.