Parting the Waters, Taylor Branch
Parting the Waters, Taylor Branch
List: $49.99 | Sale: $35.00
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Parting the Waters
America in the King Years 1954-63

Author: Taylor Branch

Narrator: Prentice Onayemi, Janina Edwards

Unabridged: 45 hr 10 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/26/2019


Synopsis

In Parting the Waters, the first volume of his essential America in the King Years series, Pulitzer Prize winner Taylor Branch gives a “compelling…masterfully told” (The Wall Street Journal) account of Martin Luther King’s early years and rise to greatness.

Hailed as the most masterful story ever told of the American civil rights movement, Parting the Waters is destined to endure for generations.

Moving from the fiery political baptism of Martin Luther King, Jr., to the corridors of Camelot where the Kennedy brothers weighed demands for justice against the deceptions of J. Edgar Hoover, here is a vivid tapestry of America, torn and finally transformed by a revolutionary struggle unequaled since the Civil War.

Taylor Branch provides an unsurpassed portrait of King's rise to greatness and illuminates the stunning courage and private conflict, the deals, maneuvers, betrayals, and rivalries that determined history behind closed doors, at boycotts and sit-ins, on bloody freedom rides, and through siege and murder.

Epic in scope and impact, Branch's chronicle definitively captures one of the nation's most crucial passages.

About Taylor Branch

Taylor Branch is the bestselling author of Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63; Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65; At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968; and The Clinton Tapes. He has won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.


Reviews

Goodreads review by CoachJim on February 11, 2025

The subtitle of this book is “America in the King Years 1854-63”. That is an accurate description for it is a view of American history from the perspective of Black Americans. It is not a pretty picture. It describes many of the events involving the Civil Rights movement from the Montgomery Bus Stri......more

Goodreads review by Frank on January 23, 2014

This is simply an unparalleled work of history that makes one appreciate and understand the civil rights movement in a way no other work can. It consistently astounds and amazes, which is itself impressive for a tale so often told. To tell the truth, I've never been very interested in the "classical"......more

Goodreads review by Clif on May 09, 2011

I first read this book years ago and was so impressed that I put it on the shelf to read again. In the meantime, I discovered that this is only the first of three books Taylor Branch has written on the Civil Rights struggle and this time I intend to take them all in. From any perspective, Parting of......more

Goodreads review by Jim on August 18, 2021

"But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering......more

Goodreads review by Clif on March 25, 2016

This book is the first of three volumes that comprise America in the King Years, a history of the civil rights movement by Taylor Branch which he wrote between 1982 and 2006. The three individual volumes have won a variety of awards, including the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for History. This book covers th......more