King: A Life

By: Jonathan Eig

Narrated by: Dion Graham

Winner of the 2024 Audie Award for Best Nonfiction Narrator!

This program is narrated by Dion Graham, narrator of over 300 audiobooks and an AudioFile Golden Voice. Dion has won multiple Earphones and Audie Awards.

"Dion Graham superbly narrates this riveting audiobook, emulating the majestic cadence of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, speeches. He captures the Civil Rights leader's deep, resonant tone; deliberate ministerial intonation; and, during offstage moments, his world-weariness... The result is a monumental biography performed exquisitely by a Golden Voice narrator."- AudioFile Magazine (Earphones Award Winner)

"This gripping biography of a revolutionary leader flies by. Listeners interested in a new perspective of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life will be captivated."—Library Journal

"King is a major achievement. With eloquence, compassion, and grace, Jonathan Eig offers a stirringly contemporary and complex portrait of a fully human—and humane—King . . . A resounding triumph." —Peniel E. Joseph, author of The Sword and the Shield

"Eig has pulled off a kind of miracle. Here is the King we know, think we know and ought to know. Here is the leader, the preacher, the orator, the husband, the father, the martyr, the human being—not with melodramatic halo in place, but in all his heroic, tragic Glory. Hallelujah!" —Ken Burns

Named a most anticipated book of 2023 by The Washington Post, The Millions, and Literary Hub

The first full biography in decades, King mixes revelatory and exhaustive new research with brisk and accessible storytelling to forge the definitive life for our times.

Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.—and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself. He casts fresh light on the King family’s origins as well as MLK’s complex relationships with his wife, father, and fellow activists. King reveals a minister wrestling with his own human frailties and dark moods, a citizen hunted by his own government, and a man determined to fight for justice even if it proved to be a fight to the death. As he follows MLK from the classroom to the pulpit to the streets of Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis, Eig dramatically re-creates the journey of a man who recast American race relations and became our only modern-day founding father—as well as the nation’s most mourned martyr.

In this landmark biography, Eig gives us an MLK for our times: a deep thinker, a brilliant strategist, and a committed radical who led one of history’s greatest movements, and whose demands for racial and economic justice remain as urgent today as they were in his lifetime.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

READ THIS BOOK!

The writing is outstanding. The narrator is superb. The story will blow you away. I can't say enough great things about this book. Wow!

Essential Reading

This long overdue book on the iconic MLK draws on extensive interviews with people who knows him, his own works, and thousands of hours of FBI material. King is presented as the legend his is, but not in a hagiographic style; warts and all. Well worth a read.

FBI’s invasion of this man’s privacy!

Thoroughly enjoyed this book. Students should be taught about this great man starting in elementary school throughout college. His wife was brilliant and needs to be incorporated in the teachings also.

In-depth knowledge of MLK

It was very thorough but also engaging. For any historian this is a must read book. The bonus at the end with the author was very cool

A rounded out humane presentation of a great man

This Book take the time to Present a complete portrait of the man that we know is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And also presents the problem he was trying to solve by displaying its complexities especially in light of where we are as a country today and challenges us to ask what next? What can those of us who care about the dream do to pick up the baton?