Thanks to NetGalley and MacMillan Audio for the digital copy of this audiobook; I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Last year, I read the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Martin Luther King Jr. and wrote this review:

‘Sometimes there’s nothing better for me than diving into an 800+ page biography of someone you know something about but want to know more. I opted to get the audiobook version of this book, which clocks in at more than 20 hours.

I’ve not read or listened to any other MLK Jr biographies, other than children’s biographies when I was growing up. What I know about King is what I’ve read in terms of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ work with civil rights legislation, and from what I’ve seen from a few documentaries on the subject of the Civil Rights Movement. So this comprehensive and well-researched biography was a must for me.

In some ways, there’s nothing new to see here, as most of the information that has come to light in recent years (like the release of FBI Files) has already been in the news. However, it’s good to go over all the new documents and form an extensive look at a complicated man. King was no saint, he certainly was a sinner, had blinders on sometimes when it came to the cause and refused to see the bigger picture, yet his influence cannot be denied.

There are some salacious truths about King’s personal life, and I’m not going to rehash them here, but they are mentioned in the book and not covered up in order to make King saint-like. I also pay attention to how a person treated their family and how the kids turned out. All of his kids say he was an absent father because of how much he travelled but was an active participant in their lives when he was around, which was rare. Coretta Scott King essentially raised those kids on her own, even before King’s assassination. His wife and children picked up the mantle and continued with his cause after he was gone.

The book isn’t perfect; as with any 800-page book, one often wonders why a certain tidbit was included and not edited out, but it is worth a read or listen if you want to strip away the built-up myth of Martin Luther King Jr and want to find the man behind it.’

This young-adult adaptation of said tome is just as effective as the original to drive home the fact that King was a man who tried to make the world of African Americans better through peaceful protest. This edition cuts out just about everything regarding his personal life and gets to the crux of what made the man. The narrator, Dion Graham, does a great job, and even does a fair impersonation of King. I can tell that this narration will help keep kids engaged and continue listening.

I’ve been wanting to read more about Dr. King, so I was really excited to get the opportunity to read an early copy of the YA edition of King: A Life. I’m impressed with how Eig was able to condense the much longer adult version without feeling like it was ‘dumbed down.’ This touches on many important milestones in Dr. King’s life. It’s easy to see the amount of research that went into this in order to portray Dr. King’s life as a whole. I learned so much about Dr. King and the civil rights movement while reading this that we were never taught in history classes. I also really appreciated the notes added at the end of the book that discuss the timeline of Dr. King’s life, questions for readers to think about after finishing, and the quote of a child asking if Dr. King had tattoos since it forces people to think of Dr. King as a person. I had both the ebook and audiobook for this, andI can’t recommend the audiobook enough. The narration by Dion Graham kept me fully invested and invoked so many emotions while reading that may not have hit as hard eyeball reading. This is such a compelling read that everyone should experience.