This was a really great biography with a good amount of depth and nuance for a young audience. It was interesting and informative and looked at King's life from many angles. He did a lot for civil rights in the US, and for many people going into this book, that may be all they know. While reading, I learned a lot about his life including details of his activism, other struggles he faced, and ways in which he was a flawed human, just like the rest of us.

I will absolutely recommend this book to teen readers.

I listened to the audiobook and the narrator was very good. The information was excellent and was so well written and engaging.
Eig writes of Dr. King's life and death, helping to bring it to life in the reader's mind. I really learned a lot about the Dr. King that I didn't previously know. Eig captures King's inner life, relationships, and the movement that forced the nation to address some of its inequities. It also painted King as a human with flaws as well as strengths that made him a great orator for the cause. I enjoyed the book and the complexities of his life and in the young reader version I think it would be very accessible to students.
I would highly recommend this book. I will look at purchasing this book for our school library.
Thank you NetGalley for the audiobookarc to preview.

This is the young adult reader version of Eig’s original 600+ page biography of King. I did not read the original, but I feel that this did a great job of encompassing King’s life and career, including details about pivotal moments in the Civil Rights Movement. While it gives some details about King’s affairs and the FBI’s wire tapping, I wish there had been a bit more because this is often what’s left out of history books. Otherwise, though, this was an informative and age-appropriate dive into MLK Jr.’s life. Thanks to NetGalley, Macmillan Audio, and Jonathan Eig for this free ARC in exchange for my honest review.

On the opposite of Karen Valby's book, I don't feel that this story needed to be told by someone who isn't Black. We all know Martin Luther King Jr and how influential he is. And to tell this story and how he was called the n word and not accurately portraying how that made him feel was weird. I also didn't feel comfortable knowing that this person who isn't Black was sitting there continuously typing out the n word. It's just something that I would rather stay with us.

Otherwise I thought it was ok. I didn't learn anything new about him from this although I wanted to. I also would have liked a bit more feeling when it was described how the world felt when he passed. My mom remembers shops and places shutting down at one point. I didn't get that feeling portrayed in this. Maybe it's different in the adult version, but this one just didn't do it for me.

I’d love to read the original version soon.

The YA version was very good. Quite a bit shorter than the adult tome. But did a great job at showing King as a whole person flaws and all and how he became a figure head of the civil rights movement.

Very accessible for a younger audience easy to digest without sugarcoating anything.

Thanks to netgalley and Macmillan audio for an alc.

I'd be interested in reading the original version though as Eig mentions in the audiobook arc that the original is over 650 pages. To have distilled that into this extremely accessible biography of King for teens took work but it works so well. I was riveted by the perspective it took that complimented the knowledge I had about King but also added new layers about his early years, particularly that he wasn't that great of a student and his questioning his competence which is what led to bouts of depression. It also mentions his marriage and children, particularly his infidelities. Yet Eig also shares plenty of his strengths as an orator and organizer.

It's a strong biography that I'm glad to have read.

5 stars

I thoroughly enjoyed this biography of Dr. Martin Luther King. I am a high school history teacher, I do not have time in my curriculum to read an entire biography, but I would recommend this one to students if they asked.. I liked how the author portrayed King as a real person not a figure head, with faults and insecurities. It reminds me of when I made a visit to the MLK birthplace in Atlanta and the park ranger told us a story of MLK and his brother using the head of their sister’s doll to play baseball. That story, and the stories in this book, help you understand that King’s mistakes, such as his infidelity to his wife, don’t detract from his mission. He was human and humans are fallible.

Thank you for the opportunity to read to listen to this audiobook.

This is aimed at younger readers, but I still feel like I learned some things. When I got my political science degree, I studied American politics and this part of history, which is fascinating and so much closer than people realize. The narration is fantastic, and the material is well-organized and presented fairly and logically. Thanks to NetGalley for letting me listen to this audiobook

This book was a well written and researched read about one of America’s most prominent civil rights leaders. I also learned about people like J. Edgar Hoover and Lyndon B Johnson.
The book did use lowercase w when referencing whites and upper case B when referencing blacks. In my opinion, both should be uppercase or both should be lowercase like it has been in the past. To do one or the other uppercase seems politically correct and unnecessary.
I did learn some things about King’s character that were not honorable, which is to be expected. We are all sinful and King was a man just like everyone else. Yet he is an example of someone whom God used to do great things despite his faults.

Thank you to Net Galley for the opportunity to review this book before its publication date.

This audiobook is adapted for young adults from the original book of the same title. The narration of this book is excellent and the story of King's life flows well through the books. It is definitely for young adults, not younger readers as there is a brief discussion of King's infidelity. Author Jonathan Eig gives a thoughtful description of Dr. King's dedication to the cause of civil rights for which he ultimately gives his life.

I listened to this one. The narration is great! The story itself is also told very well. I have read other books about King but there was definitely new material I have not read before.

Thank you to NetGalley for the arc in exchange for my review.

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.