“It will be difficult for anyone to better this book. It goes deeper and richer than a mere homage to Malcolm X. It is a work of art, a feast that combines genres skillfully: biography, true-crime, political commentary. It gives us Malcolm X in full gallop, a man who died for his belief in freedom, a man whom Marable calls the ‘fountainhead’ of the black power movement in America.”

— Will Haygood, The Washington Post

“In his revealing and prodigiously researched new biography, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, Manning Marable — a professor at Columbia University and the director of its Center for Contemporary Black History…— vividly chronicles these many incarnations of his subject. . . Mr. Marable artfully strips away the layers and layers of myth that have been lacquered onto his subject’s life — first by Malcolm himself in that famous memoir, and later by both supporters and opponents after his assassination in 1965 at the age of 39.”

—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Unlike Bruce Perry’s 1991 biography, Malcolm, which entertained the most outlandish stories in an attempt to present a comprehensive portrait, Marable’s biography judiciously sifts fact from myth.”

—Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic