Review Summaries

• Its scale and meticulous use of sources are highly regarded, and it is often treated as a benchmark history of the civil-rights movement.

Reviews

• 公民権運動とケネディの時代を知らずに現在のアメリカは解らない

  キング牧師の活躍を中心に据えたアメリカ現代史3部作の第１部 キング牧師とケネディ大統領が時代の要請により世界に大きな影響を与える立場にほぼ同時に立たされながら、社会を動かしていく様子が詳細に描かれています。黒人差別の撤廃が、多くの人々のものすごいエネルギーの集まり とぶつかりあいの結果もたらされたという事実だけでなく、現代アメリカの政治や文化の底流を学ぶ事ができる大作です。この第1部では黒人差別撤廃の歴史から、キング牧師が運動の中心となっていく過程をとりあげている。 題名は、キング牧師が好んで用いた旧約聖書のモーゼの事績から。

• An epic and intimate portrait: spell-binding!

  This is one of the most powerful and moving books I've ever read, and I wanted to give it six stars. How here to do it justice? First, it's a cracking read. (Other history books can be heavy, you keep checking to see how many pages to the end, or left in the chapter). "Parting the Waters" is a real page-turner. It is long -- it kept me going through a long haul flight, lots of airport waiting and a couple of long bus/train rides -- but it made the time pass effortlessly. It's a great story, structured like a novel: strong central character, you meet him in experienced youth; the hero encounters challenges, and overcomes them and embarks on a long and dangerous journey with many battles and dangers, the hero takes on these battles and grows stronger. This classic plot structure with a real heroic quality makes it a gripping read. "Parting the Waters" chronicles the grand canvass of the civil rights movement: the major battles (Montgomery bus boycott, the freedom rides, the voter registration drivers, the Birmingham campaign...), the politcal backdrop (Kennedy's election, Kennedy's Presidency, the dilemmas over the Civil Rights bill), all the characters, internal conflicts and under-currents among civil rights organisations and campaigners. But as well it zooms in with tender and intimate portraits on the people at the centre or caught up in the turmoil: how did it affect one of the protestors... or the story of a mother... or of one of the tragic victims. It's so important: the end of apartheid in the world's biggest democracy. Tenant farmers who tried to register to vote were evicted from their farms. Men and women riding a bus were stoned and fire-bombed. Police officers beat up citizens for fun. Those who tried to testify were shot in the head. And, terribly, so much more. Parting the Waters makes you live the emotion. I felt dumbfounded at what southern USA was like in the fifties and sixties, inspired by the civil rights campaigners, numbed by the viciousness and brutal violence they faced, in tears at what they had to go through, angry, so angry they had go through it; on the edge of my seat, alert and rivetted, to see what happened next, bewildered by and in despair of the whites' attitudes, in tears again at the protestors' courage, such inspiring and daunting courage. And Martin Luther King: we see him with all his weaknesses and flaws, but what a giant of a man! What a giant of human history! This book is being read in 1000 years time and I run out of superlatives.

• Read this to learn how heroic people were in the civil rights movement

  Taylor Branch has written a three-volume history of the civil rights movement. Being three volumes, the book is comprehensive enough to include the names of the hymns sung in church services. These details help readers really get involved in the dramatic events of the time. Reading about Selma and other events, you actually share the fear of the participants and appreciate what heroes these people really were.

• MOST PHILOSOPHICALLY INTERESTING, AND NARRATIVELY COMPELLING BOOK ON KING & 'MOVEMENT'

  I have known Taylor Branch since 1968, when I was a writer for The Great Speckled Bird, already the South's Standard Underground or Alternative newspaper, now digitized via the Georgia State University labor and cultural archives, one of the leading such sites of archival innovation in the region, perhaps the U.S. At the time I'm not sure what Taylor was doing, for work, but I recall he was living in Atlanta, perhaps working a day job, but organizing for McCarthy, in opposing Lyndon Johnson's renomination, as part of the broad based opposition to the Vietnam/Indochina war. As a graduate of one of the finer Presbyterian prep schools in the city, he continued on his career up east, after the McCarthy/Julian Bond led challenge delegation upset the labor activists supporting Humphrey, in Chicagoas well as the old south folk appointed by then Gov. Lester Maddox, in one of the great and least remember successes of the African-American pioneered Challenge strategy which changed the Democratic Party, andra America, leading to the nominations and victories of progressives, like Bill Clinton, and ultimately, Barack Obama. Between the time of the successful seating of the Georgia Challenge Delegation in Chicago, in 1968, and 1971, black Americans had already decided on a strategy of nominating and ultimately electing a Black President, the title of a front page article for THE NATION, which I wrote in 1971, while still writing and 'reporting' for THE BIRD, and as an associate at the new INSTITUTE FOR SOUTHERN STUDIES, of which Julian Bond was President, chosen for his opposition to the war, the Supreme Court case which bears his name, his own literary acumen, and his father's scholarly writing as best known, in a book published around that time, '68, Negro Education in Alabama, A study in cotton and steel. This profound work out of the 30s continued to inspire the work of the Institute as it moved to North Carolina, and I would be surprised if its publication SOUTHERN EXPOSURE did not include a favorable review of this book, now a Classic, in the same league as C.Vann Woodward's books, or those of Dr. Bond, but with the twist of exciting narrative writing with NARRATIVE carrying the argument, (see preceding reviews, including some of 60's Republicans, (self described) instead of the more typical 'academic argumentative style' which is characteristic of the post PhD, tenure seeking, too often eyelid closing SERIOUS RESEARCH. Branch managed to combine the intensity of research or a well writing and researched PhD, with access to many key people, because of his location of 'home town Atlanta,' as well as a dynamic writing style and an appropriate Perspective which puts the life of Dr. King, and the many, many other players in the non-violent MOVEMENT which Branch so tellingly describes, quotes, etc at the center of the world non-violent MOVEMENT, the most philosophically interesting movement, to quote a friend, Dr. Hortense Spillers of Vanderbilt, in the post Hiroshima world. And this book, so far, (FBI records have not been completely released and organized on many of the 'lesser' groups of the era, such as CORE, SNCC, and even SCLC, or even NAACP, all key groups resisting in different ways the varying forms of totalitarianism in such familiar venues as Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina, all of which continue to contribute their neo-fascists innovations to the national dialogue.

• Superb

  Yes, this book is l-o-n-g; but it is also deeply researched, passionately argued, and written with the flair and narrative drive of a first-rate novel. Or to put the matter less delicately: the book is nothing short of a masterpiece. Don't hesitate. Buy it.

• Superb

  Superb

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