King, A Life: An Evening with Jonathan Eig

Join The Book Stall on Wednesday, June 28 at 6:30 pm for a captivating discussion featuring Jonathan Eig presenting his new biography, King: A Life. Named a most anticipated book of 2023 by The Washington Post, The Millions, and Literary Hub, this first full King biography in decades includes eight pages of black and white photos and mixes revelatory new research with brisk and accessible storytelling to present the definitive life for our times. Mr. Eig will be in conversation with J.A. Adande, the director of sports journalism at Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism. This event is free with registration, to register, please visit our website.

More About the Book: Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life is the first major biography in decades of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr., and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself. King reveals a minister wrestling with his own human frailties and dark moods, a citizen hunted by his own government, and a man determined to fight for justice even if it proved to be a fight to the death. As he follows MLK from the classroom to the pulpit to the streets of Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis, Eig dramatically re-creates the journey of a man who recast American race relations and became our only modern-day founding father.

In this landmark biography, Eig gives us an MLK for our times: a deep thinker, a brilliant strategist, a perplexing husband and father, and a committed radical who led one of history’s greatest movements, and whose demands for racial and economic justice remain as urgent today as they were in his lifetime.

Ken Burns says, “Eig has pulled off a kind of miracle. Here is the King we know, think we know and ought to know. Here is the leader, the preacher, the orator, the husband, the father, the martyr, the human being–not with melodramatic halo in place, but in all his heroic, tragic Glory. Hallelujah!”

More About the Author: Jonathan Eig is a former senior writer for The Wall Street Journal. He is the New York Times bestselling author of five books, including Ali: A Life, Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig, and Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Season. Ken Burns calls him “a master storyteller,” and Eig’s books have been listed among the best of the year by The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Sports Illustrated, and Slate. He lives in Chicago with his wife and children.

Conversation partner J.A. Adande is the director of sports journalism at Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. Adande has worked in sports media for over two and a half decades, including multiple roles at ESPN and 10 years as a sports columnist at the Los Angeles Times, in addition to jobs at The Washington Post and Chicago Sun-Times. He has covered a broad array of sports and events, including 20 NBA Finals, Super Bowls, the World Series, the Stanley Cup finals, the Olympics, the World Cup, Wimbledon, the U.S. Open and the Masters. He continues to appear on ESPN’s Around The Horn, where he has been a panelist since the show’s beginning in 2002.