Pillar of Fire
America in the King Years, Part II - 1963-64

This is the second volume of Taylor Branch’s trilogy on Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement. This volume covers the years from 1963 to 1965. These were pivotal years in American History with the beginning of the Lyndon Johnson presidency, the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Right......more

The second volume of Taylor Branch’s towering trilogy about Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights movement covers so many momentous events, such as the assassinations of John Kennedy and Malcolm X, the Mississippi Freedom Summer, King’s Nobel Prize, and America’s entry into Vietnam, that it i......more

This book is the second of three volumes that comprise America in the King Years, a history of the civil rights movement. Taylor Branch won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for his work on this project. This book covers the history of the civil rights movement between the years of 1964 to 1965. I listened to......more

All three volumes of Branch's history of the civil rights movement are well worth reading. I read them out of order, starting with the first, followed by the third and ending, finally, with this, the second. For me, the history intersected with memory in that I was alive during the period 1954-68. M......more

This was a very densely packed narrative of the civil rights movement in the US from the years 1963-1965. The first two hundred pages or so recapped the first volume (“Parting the Waters”) at a very breakneck pace, although it did begin to include the history of the NOI during the early 1960s that t......more