This book is even better than the glowing reviews suggested. It's simply a masterpiece of intelligent writing. The author respects the reader's intelligence, and has an amazing ability to mix detail and the big picture. I love the way the author combines a highly readable style with both arresting action, minute detail, and yet keeps his balance. He is able to get you excited about the events in Albany, GA as though they are happening now, then backs off to show how the whole campaign kind of died. He has remarkable energy and writing talent, and a wonderful ability to shift gears, weave threads together.

As you begin to read chapter one, this book will become a page-turner. The amazingly woven detail gives life to this story of over fifty years ago. Author Taylor Branch documents how M. L. King, Jr. walked into the storm of what was to become the Civil Rights Movement, and was then sucked into its vortex. As a "boomer" I was alive during parts of this, growing up in the Midwest. I remember some headlines and TV scenes, but reading the minutiae of what was behind those headlines was like unto discovering a mother's diary. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The best single book on the civil rights movement I have ever read. Parting the Waters is partly a wonderful, complicated biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. However, it is also a history of the early years of the entire civil rights movement. King, SCLC, and SNCC are described in great detail and their efforts are set against a background of federal reluctance to intervene in the South. Inspiring and detailed.

I am about halfway through this book. Even though I have not finished yet I feel compelled to comment on it. I believe it is extremely important for African Americans of my generation to get a more complete understanding of the civil rights movement. So far this book has opening my eyes and changed the way I view our African American experience.

What is best about this read is it flows like a history book. I give much credit to Mr. Branch for simply telling the story and not adding too much of his own commentary and opinion. That is one of my pet peeves with many of our `writers' today. They want to impose their opinions and biased interpretations. We do not need opinions. We need to educate ourselves with facts and draw our own conclusions. Okay, I will get off the soapbox.

Anyway I highly recommend this book. It is a very long read, but if you seek a deeper understanding of the African American experience this is a great start. Many of the issues we face today can be interpreted more accurately by getting a more complete account of our past.

By most accounts, Branch's three volume history of the Civil Rights Movement is the authoritative account of Dr. King's life. But beyond the facts and history, this particular volume is an example of masterful storytelling. I read this book during my morning and evening commutes, stuffed between strangers on the train. Branch transported me to another time and place, at times on the brink of tears. Branch devoted decades of his life to crafting this story. His efforts leave us with an honest and beautifully told story - one of our nation's most inspiring and tragic.

This is the first of a trilogy of books on the civil rights struggle in the USA as centered around the Reverend Martin Luther King Junior. Covering the 1950s and early 1960s, this book lays the groundwork for many of the pivotal events that would take the civil rights movement onto the international stage and eventually legend. All the key characters of this movement would enter the stage of history here... Bayard Rustin, the gay, pacifist communist, would play a key role in organizing the March on D.C. LBJ, the master of the Senate, and then vice president would come to realize the need of the Civil Rights Act, as segregation was intertwined with poverty and to defeat one, he needed to defeat the other. Malcolm X would rise in the Nation of Islam, paving a path to glory and his eventual death. And the central character that bound them together; the Reverend Dr. King himself, would change history by trying to tie together the lunch counter sit-ins, freedom rides, marches, and legal debates into one cogent movement.

All of this and much, much more is laid out in careful, chronological detail by Taylor Branch. Backing every word, every name, and every date with citations to court documents, newspaper records, first-hand interviews and countless other sources, the author brings this period to life, vividly with raw emotion. This book lays bare the soul of America at this time, from the inner politics in the White House and courthouses throughout the South, to pressrooms, jails, and public squares. We, the reader, see how the Civil Rights movement ground forth one city, one law, one riot at a time. Incredible! Highly worth the time to read thru from cover to cover.

This more than fills in some blanks. Number one book on civil rights, more than a must read.

This book provides incomparable insight into the bowels of the early civil rights movement. While most accounts are only superficial, focusinging only on the "significant" events, Branch takes his readers into the heart of the storm to show how intricate political pressures, ideologies, spiritual upliftings, violence, non-violence, press coverage, rivalaries, and extroardinary courage entangled to "lift a despised minority from oblivion."

Any less thorough of an account than Branch's would seem to distort the rich history. Do not be intimidated by the 1000 pages (only part of a 3 volume set). In fact, Branch's prose is so melifluous and the history is so engaging that you will regret that the book isn't twice as long.

I am envious of you, new readers, for I wish I could relive the incredible experience of reading this book for the first time. Be prepared to have your heart strings tugged, your passion inflamed, your mind stimulated, and your committment to justice solidified.

Branch's three-volumes on America in the King Years are the best source one can have on the history of the civil rights movement, at least that part of it between 1954 and 1968. The central thread in these books is the life and activities of Martin Luther King Jr. However, Branch also tries to follow some major trends in other aspects of the civil rights movement, especially in his second volume where he provides one of the most complete pictures of the last years of Malcolm X's life, a day to day story of Malcolm's life, to match the evolution of his ideas charted in George Breitman's _he Last Year of Malcolm X: Evolution of a Revolutionary_.

In all of these volumes Branch's strength is his straight-ahead reportage of what happened. Unlike most writers on the civil rights movement, he seems to have no personal agenda, nor position in the issues that were constantly in contention. His picture of King is honest without the hero worship some invest him with.

In this first volume I was impressed by Branch's picture of the middle class milieu that Martin Luther King Jr. emerged from as well as his continued struggle with that milieu or rather participation in struggles within that milieu over whether to take an activist position in the civil rights movement. King always faced not only white racist opposition, but the opposition to others within the African American middle class and especially within the Black Church. This was reflected in the struggle Branch records within the National Baptist Convention, the large Black religious organization on the planet, between Taylor, supported by King and Jackson, a struggle in which the anti-civil rights activism Jackson won.

Another facet of this history is the way the struggle was constantly initiated and pushed forward by two forces, black working and farming people like Rosa Parks and E.D. Nixon, the two people who launched the bus boycott in Montgomery with King, and the tremendous uprising by Black college and high school youth that began with the lunch counter sit-ins in 1960s and continued throughout this period. Constantly it was initiatives and struggles launched by these forces, rather than the machinations or strategy of King and his colleagues that pushed the movement forward.


Sadly, the book revealed a level of collaboration and subordination by King to the powers that be that could have only stifled the struggle. King continually looked to these forces to provide the real force and impetus to break down Southern Segregation, and was continually rejected except when the mass struggle forced the government to act. Branch explains thatsituations that seemed like confrontations between Southern Segregationists and the Kennedy administration like the University integration battles in Mississippi and Alabama were arranged behind the scenes between Kennedy and the segregations to take place in a way that would not weaken the Southern Democrats who led the fight against integration.

This volume recounts how the little skirmishes between J Edgard Hoover, head of the FBI and Kennedy did not get in the way of Kennedy's use of red-baiting to limit and control the civil rights movement in general and King's Southern Christian Leadership Council in particular. What is interesting here is that Branch reveals that despite the political demise of the Communist party as a force in the 1950s under the blows of the witch hunt, the revelations about Stalin's criminal rule, and the crushing of the Hungarian revolution, through this period the bulk of the FBI's focus was fighting "subversives" and not crime.


Yet, the FBI never played any serious role in prosecuting the bombings, murders, burning of homes and churches, and the other terror and brutalization of Black folk seeking their rights throughout this period. Even when the Kennedys were forced to provide law enforcement and phyiscal force against the segregationists, they had to go AROUND the FBI bringing in border patrolmen, prison guards, drug enforcement agents, US marshalls, and the military. As can testify as someone who spent time in the voter registration drives in the Mississippi, Branch is completely accurate when he show that the FBI's real role was to slander, disrupt, paralyze, and otherwise set back the Civil Rights struggle.

We should look at Branch's trilogy about what they say about bigger questions than even civil rights. In the years he covers, a fundamental change took place in the United States. Jim Crow segregation was shattered, big advances took place in Black rights across the country, and the ability of reaction to use racism to carry out its business was weakened. Of course, Black people remain oppressed, formal legal segregation has been replaced by de facto segregation, and racism permeates this society.

However, we can look at the King years as years when millions of African Americans, millions of youth, and millions of other working people entered political life and made big changes. In doing so they pointed the direction still needed to get out of these problems. For this, these books should be studied, for future battles, not nostalgia for the past!

Reads like a well wrought thriller or adventure novel. The level of detail is extraordinary. The blend of courage and betrayal, pettiness and self sacrifice, portrayed in this history bring it alive to someone who lived through the era and still had no clue about the magnitude and complexity of the struggle.

This book should be a required reading in every college and university across America. This is not Civil rights history nor Black history, but American History. The reading is dense, but this is not a bad thing because there is so much to learn. Branch does a wonderful job in focusing and including the many people involved in, arguably, the most important times in America. At times it will weigh on your heart, and at times it gives hope.

I grew up during the times reviewed in this book. It rankles somewhat to find how little I knew of my own "history". If you are a "end-of-the-curve-baby-boomer," I recommend this book to you without reservation.

Few books on any subject merit or can sustain 3,000 pages, but this first part of the trilogy is so compelling, so fascinating, so well written that 3,000 pages may not be enough.

This is how history should be written, with the facts creating the emotion, and the personalities highlighting the events. A compelling perspecitive on our shared history with unflinching insight into Dr. King's life and how he affected us all.

Required reading.

First of all, let me say this is not a current book. I picked it up at the used paperback store because I had read other books by this author. If you're fortunate enough to have an inexpensive source for paperbacks, you might like this mystery.

David Tardiff, a brilliant physicist, his wife Mariah Bolt, a CIA employee, and their daughter Lindsay are stationed in Vienna. Mariah usually takes Lindsay to the American School, but one day ten months ago David takes her. There's an explosion and he is left almost a vegetable and his daughter is crippled. Four months later, Mariah brings them back to suburban Washington DC...David to a nursing home, she and Lindsay to a new home and life. It's now early winter.

Just a few weeks ago, five nuclear weapons experts, two Americans and three Russians, were killed in a fiery accident near Taos, New Mexico. They had worked at the Los Alamos lab and the feds were very interested in the useless remains of the accident. Why? Are these two `accidents' tied together in any way?

Mariah is being stalked. Paul Chaney, a journalist Mariah met in Vienna, is back in the States and is trying to contact her because of info he has about the Vienna accident. Mariah confronts her boss, Frank Tucker, to find out what's what and gets nowhere. Paul and Mariah forge a partnership to get to the bottom of the nastiness.

As the plot thickens, there are several twists and turns to keep you interested and surprised. Who can Mariah trust? Who hired the stalker? What secrets have you or your loved one kept from each other?

In reading this book, you will believe in the power of prayer, bear witness to miracles, marvel at overlapping destinies, and give thanks for accidents of history. You also will be humbled and inspired by the spiritual life and public work of Dr. Martin Luther King.

Author Branch presents an enormous cast of characters and complicated interweaving storylines to tell the amazing story of the civil rights movement at a time when the country was struggling to integrate the moral momentum of WWII into a domestic reconciliation on race. By making King the main road through which all things pass, the huge story stays on track and remains a story of human, instead of political, dimensions.

King was a dreamer and a pragmatic strategist. But many of his most illuminating moments came from unexpected or desperate places such as his first movement speech in the early days of the Montgomery bus boycott or his "Letter From a Birmingham Jail." Branch shows how the movement drew more power from epiphanies and spontaneous acts than it did from planned insurrections. That passion of the human spirit to right the world, as exemplified by Dr. King, frames this story.

Even though we all know the history of the boycotts, the sit-ins, the marches, the voter registration drives, and the Freedom Rides, Branch writes so forcefully and knowledgeably about the people, that it comes alive all over again. The outcome seems uncertain despite us knowing the ending which is what makes the stories in this book living history.

I can't say enough good things about this book by Taylor Branch. With other Pulitzer Prize winning books (like Guns of August) you may ponder, "How did this ever win the top prize for literature?," but with "Parting the Waters," the answer comes immediately apparent that it is deserving of accolades upon accolades. An understanding of 20th century America is incomplete without reading Branch's book on the early Civil Rights movement.

What Branch does so well is write compelling narrative that leaves the book hard to put down. He makes a 922 page book seem much much shorter, which reading that length of a book would mostly be a labor of love to finish otherwise. What he also does brilliantly is to open up the context of the Civil Rights movement to the major events on the world stage and developments of the time. Instead of looking at the Civil Rights movement under a microscope, Branch brings in the Cuban Missile Crisis, popular culture, and so much more to help frame those events and that time.

It is hard to understand the amount of hatred in parts of our country during that time but Branch's book brings it out in shockingly brutal details. To understand what our country went through a scant half century ago, helps illuminate race relations today. We owe a great debt to the leaders of the civil rights movement for being extremely brave, many times to the point of giving their lives, to bring about needed social change in America. After reading Branch's account of the beginning of the Civil Rights movement, it struck me that those years were nothing short of a war, a revolution, fought through peaceful means against all odds.

The reading of this book will leave you changed, liberal and conservative alike. It has reached elevated status of my all time favorite book list...and I have read a few. Everyone should read this book in a lifetime.
--MMW

What a great book! Taylor Branch has done an outstanding job with the history of the early years of the Civil Rights Movement in America. He does a great job with a mini biography of Dr. King that digs into his education and thinking which really illuminates the subject. The background on all of the other main players in this important chapter in our nation's history are equally well done. A fine book that was difficult to put down.

This is an epic.

It discusses the early years of the Civil Rights Movement from the perspective of Martin Luther King Jr. and those around him. The cast of characters ranges from the cantankerous Vernon Johns - a hobo preacher with a doctorate - to the truly bizarre and paranoid J. Edgar Hoover, seeking to destroy king and those around him based on what can only be described as bogus and hyped intelligence of communist infiltration, to the young idealistic members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Comittee, to a President and Attourney General (JFK and RFK) who don't know what to think and really just wish the whole problem would just go away.

It is a long haul (921 pages) and very emotionally draining so be prepared but it is worth every page and very much due the Pulitzer prize that it earned.

The first few years of the civil rights movement and the years leading up to them are covered in this volume of Taylor Branch's trilogy. After reading this, one really gets a sense of why this movement was truely epic in scope and importance. The narrative does a great job of describing a mass movement with all of it's advances, setbacks, complexities, and contradictions. One gets a vivid impression of the pace of these events and the real change of consciousness that occured among an entire people. Don't be intimidated by the size of this book, it's exciting to read.

Parting the Waters is an eye-opening look at the incredible drama of the Civil Rights movement, told through the prism of the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Branch is a fantastic writer, weaving together stories from the King home to the Oval Office.

As someone to young to have lived through the Civil Rights era, I found the revelations of this book to be shocking and enlightening. I highly recommend this book for anyone with an interest in Civil Rights and American History.

Taylor Branch has written a magnificent history of the early civil rights movement, using the life and career of Martin Luther King, Jr. as a framework. Although there is a great deal of information about King's life both public and private, other key players in this great drama also receive extensive treatment. Some, such as John & Robert Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover, are well-known. Others have received far less recognition: Vernon Johns, the powerful itinerant country preacher who was a kind of grandfather to the movement; Bayard Rustin, whose unconventional lifestyle clashed with political reality in a way that caused much pain to King; Stanley Levison, one of King's closest confidante's and advisors, from whom King was pressured to distance himself because of alleged communist ties; Bob Moses, a tireless, courageous worker who toiled for years in the Deep South to register Negroes for the vote.

Branch also narrates events such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Freedom Rides with the you-are-there immediacy of an eyewitness reporter and the eye for detail of a novelist. This book is a very satisfying and informative read.

This book - the first in a projected series of three volumes - begins a comprehensive history of the civil rights movement, focusing on the role played by Martin Luther King. It is not a biography of King per se but Taylor Branch has a lot to say about how King, through personal effort, became a great leader. King was, of course, a great orator, and Branch is pretty adept at analyzing his methods. But almost anyone who has heard King or read him knows that he was channeling something greater than himself.

What King wanted for himself was a life of scholarship. Yet, as Jesus said on the Mount of Olives, "not my will, but yours be done." In a brilliant anecdote, Branch relates how King was elected, almost accidentally, to head the Montgomery Bus Boycott. At a mass meeting that evening, King gave an inspired speech. At the end of the speech, the audience sat, stunned. People reached out to touch him as he left the building. "[King] would work on his timing, but his oratory had just made him forever a public person. . . . He was twenty-six, and had not quite twelve years and four months to live." The obstacles in Montgomery in 1955 were many, and only a few weeks passed before King sat in despair, his face buried in his hands. He prayed, saying "I've come to the point where I can't face it alone." As he spoke these words, he experienced a transcendent religious experience that gave him the strength to continue his struggle. No man is perfect, but King knew his duty, and did it.

Beyond its insights into King's character, this book offers readers a survey of our country at a critical juncture. When the civil rights movement began, the balance of interests in the United States had left the South in the grip of the great evil of segregation. King himself shifted the balance. At the same time, thousands of ordinary Americans, devoted to nonviolent struggle, suffered tremendous privation, loss of livelihood, beatings, and sometimes death, making it impossible for the federal government to ignore the plight of Southern blacks.

Finally, through Branch's history, we meet a large number of what could almost be called interesting minor figures except that they were not minor at all. One of these is Vernon Johns, a brilliant farmer-preacher who preached the social gospel. In a memorable scene, Johns is asked to address a group of white and black preachers who are meeting to discuss the role of the church during a time of racial tension. He says, "The thing that disappoints me about the Southern white church is that it spends all of its time dealing with Jesus after the cross, instead of dealing with Jesus before the cross. . . . If that were the heart of Christianity, all God had to do was drop him down on Friday, let them kill him, and then yank him up again on Easter Sunday. That's all you hear. You don't hear so much about his three years of teaching that man's religion is revealed in the love of his fellow man. He who says he loves God and hates his fellow man is a liar, and the truth is not in him. That is what offended the leaders of Jesus's own established religion as well as the colonial authorities from Rome. That's why they put him up there. . . . I want to deal with Jesus before the cross. I don't give a damn what happened to him after the cross." At this point, no one's too happy that they invited Johns to speak. Lest we think that Johns was just an eccentric, though, Branch also refers us to Johns' "Transfigured Moments," which can be found on the web and shows Johns to be a serious man of considerable understanding and imagination.

In addition to its merit as history, Parting the Waters is a great read, and deserves to be read slowly. If you can do this, the time you spend with this 900-plus-page book will be extremely rewarding.

What can you say about "Parting the Waters," Taylor Branch's history of the early King years and the Civil Rights struggle in the 1950s and early 1960s other than to say it inspires, angers, and awes?

I have nothing negative to say about this book. Branch makes vivid a period of history already being whitewashed and forgotten. I did not know how violent the reaction to Civil Rights was. I did not know how courageous the members of CORE, SNCC, and SCLC were to withstand to the torrent of abuse, threats, and violence simply to demand their rights.

Today's conservative politicians will have us believe that the Civil Rights' movement was a brief, aberrant moment that has passed. But being so recent, we know that undercurrents still exist today, that the bully racists who terrorized Civil Rights' marchers are still alive today. And with the struggle reaching its desperate crescendo around the right to vote, the voting irregularities in the South during the 2000 election seems doubly suspect and should serve as a poignant reminder that the battle for Civil Rights is ongoing.

Thanks to Taylor Branch for so clearly and dramatically presenting the information to me in a volume. He has truly done a service with this book by keeping alight the memory of the heroic struggle for freedom.

Presenting an authentic and comprehensive picture of the mammoth civil rights movement in the United States in the post WWII era is a daunting task, yet noted author and journalist Taylor Branch has succeeded masterfully with this, the first of a two-volume history of the struggle of blacks in America to find justice, equality and parity with the mainstream white society. Tracing the rise of the singular leader personified in the young Rev. Martin Luther King, Branch sets the stage for a wide range of events, personalities, and public issues. This is truly a wonderful read, fascinating, entertaining, and endlessly detailed in its description of people and events, and quite insightful in its chronicling of the fortune of those social forces that created, sustained, and accomplished the single most momentous feat of meaningful social action in our nation's contemporary history.

His range of subjects is necessarily wide and deep, and we find coverage of every aspect of the tumultuous struggle beginning in the deep South, and gradually working its way north and west until most of the urban northeast also surrendered to the battle cry for civil rights and justice under the law. In many respects this borders on being a biography of Martin Luther King and his times, yet Branch so extends his coverage of the eddies and currents of the movement itself that it appears to be by far the most comprehensive and fair-minded treatment of the civil rights movement published to date. Whether covering the issue of Martin Luther King's own personal life, his internal philosophical concerns, or his appetite for young white women, the reader is engaged with every element of this and a thousand other personalities, issues, and events that carved out the history of our country for almost twenty years.

One finds a very detailed of the Kennedy involvement in the movement, first as a purely political ploy to help to win the black vote in the extremely tight race for the Presidency in 1960, and then as an administration struggling to do what was right in the face of enormous social, political, and even economic opposition. Here too we find an absorbing account of how the FBI attempted to infiltrate and influence the movement, with J. Edgar Hoover's adroit political savvy and deep-seated racism causing great difficulty and a number of tribulations for the civil rights cause. The names and places and events described here are legion, and one gets the sense that anyone who had a conscience was involved, and many of the names mentioned later went on to greater accomplishment and further noteworthy contribution in their public lives and careers.

This, then, is a stupendous first volume of a wonderful two-volume history of the civil rights movement in the United States, and covers the period from the late 1950s when the first rumblings of the movement were sounded until just after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas in November of 1963. The second volume picks up the thread thereafter, extending out through the Johnson years and including aspects of the coalescence of the movement with the Vietnam anti-war protest. This is a wonderful book, and one I would consider essential reading for anyone with an interest in American history in the 20th century. I highly recommend both books, and I hope you appreciate reading them as much as I did. Enjoy!