Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning MarableMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book is a very updated look at the life so many know from The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Indeed, it rather disputes or amends the material that came out in that book published after Malcolm X's death and co-authored by "liberal Republican" Alex Haley. For my part, I see this life as having an arc reaching back to Marcus Garvey and a terrorizing Klan through his parents to some parallels I see with Thomas Paine. See, Paine was a revolutionary intellectual eventually shunned by his own fellow rebels and went international while moving from championing the right of his group to demanding human rights and finding himself shunned. For Malcolm X that shunning led to a public execution with the apparent complicity of at least local police. This tragic ending feels foreshadowed by violence from the 1962 Los Angeles Police shooting of seven members of the Nation of Islam (one in the back while his hands were up) to eventual firebombing, beatings, etc. from NOI actors as Malcolm X broke away and stood up his own organization. His own success -- better than that of the NOI -- of building ties to traditional Islam and connecting to the a post-colonial Pan-African movement surely led to loathing from the envious.
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