Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention Hardcover – April 4, 2011

I have to preface this review with a little information about my own background. At one time my parents were members of the Nation of Islam. Their active involvement with the Nation had ceased by the time I was four or so, which was also around the time that my parents separated, so I have very little memory of any direct experience with the Nation's activities. Nevertheless, the Nation's teachings affected my life in subtle and profound ways. Although I didn't understand it at the time, my father's involvement with the Nation was one of several factors that contributed to the deep tension between him and my grandmother, who is a staunch Baptist. Oftentimes, perhaps most of the time, that tension was palpable, as my grandmother lived with me and my father for a good portion of my childhood, and was deeply involved in my upbringing. His experience with the Nation also fueled his deep inner turmoil to a great extent, although I didn't understand that at the time either. It wasn't until I got older and began to study the history of the Nation of Islam that my father's paranoid ramblings about FBI bugs in our house and recordings of my mother's voice being played on television, which completely mystified me as child, were put into context. That history also helped me to make sense of the divergence between my mother's and my own views on race when I was an adolescent. Studying that history helped me to make sense of my upbringing and my place in a world in which I often felt, and at times still do feel, alienated and displaced. So naturally, as I grew up, I eagerly devoured whatever I was able to understand about the Nation. And most of what I learned was and is centered in the figure of Malcolm X. When Spike Lee's "X" was first released, I think I saw it at least three times in one week. Over the years, I read collections of his speeches and immersed myself in recordings of his talks. I began to appreciate more deeply the many ways in which Malcolm's life and teachings intersected with and indelibly touched my own, from his status as a symbol of courageous manhood and personal dignity for the men of my family, particularly my older brother, to my status as his namesake, Malik. For me, Malcolm's story was and always will be profoundly personal. Perhaps that sense of personal connection is part of the reason that I am somewhat disappointed with Dr. Marable's work.

The book has many strengths. It does an excellent job of situating Malcolm's life and teachings in the broader historical context of his times. I have to note that there seem to be some factual inaccuracies in his discussion of the history of Islam, but on the whole I believe it's reasonably accurate. And the book provides a fuller account of Malcolm's life and death than some of the more hagiographic works written about him. But that valuable accomplishment is overshadowed and diminished by speculation and salacious innuendo that has no place in a scholarly account. Beginning with the opening chapters of the book, Dr. Marable consistently advances speculative theories about malcolm's inner motives and state of mind. This would be reasonable if he consistently qualified his hypotheses as such, and supported them with corroborating evidence. But over and over again, Dr. Marable advances naked speculation as conclusive fact. One the most egregious and controversial examples of this tendency is Dr. Marable's claim that Malcolm was involved in homosexual prostitution as a youth. Given the circumstances of Malcolm's life at that time, that would not be particularly surprising. He would have been neither the first nor the last destitute and drug-addicted youth to prostitute himself to anyone who could offer some ready cash. However, Dr. Marable offers no evidence for the one incident of prostitution that he alleges took place other than hearsay from two of Malcolm's acquaintances that appears in secondary sources. That's far from conclusive, or even persuasive. However, Dr. Marable treats the allegation as practically incontrovertible, despite the admittedly circumstantial evidence supporting the claim. He goes so far as to assert that the alleged incident was a basic element of Malcolm's identity at the time:

"Malcolm-Detroit Red, Satan, hustler, onetime pimp, drug addict and drug dealer, homosexual lover, ladies man, numbers racketeer, burglar, Jack Carlton, and convicted thief. . ."

Whatever Malcolm's sexual habits may or may not have been, Dr. Marable's failure to convincingly support this much-hyped claim smacks of crass sensationalism. Equally troubling is Dr. Marable's habit of psychoanalyzing his subjects and ascribing to them motives that he could not possibly discern and advances no evidence for, claiming for instance that Malcolm subliminally incorporated jazz rhythms into his speaking style, and asserting that the Nation of Islam's success in converting Black prisoners was due to the fact that, "the depression caused by long confinement made inmates particularly vulnerable." Those things may very well be true. And they may very well be false. But true or not, they are without question nothing more than sheer speculation, and represent the author's own assumptions rather than historical fact, or even reasoned argumentation. What is most unfortunate about these speculative digressions is that they are almost wholly tangential to the central events and influences in Malcolm's life, and only serve to distract from the well-documented history that Dr. Marable took such pains to reconstruct.

Added to all of this is a significant amount of critical editorial comment on Malcolm's early beliefs and decisions. Malcolm himself admitted-indeed stressed-in no uncertain terms that his early beliefs were immature, destructive, and uncritically dogmatic. It is unedifying to witness his biographer harangue him nearly 50 years after his death for mistakes that he himself unreservedly confessed to and repented of during his own lifetime.

My personal impression, and it is simply my personal impression, is that out of a desire to be iconoclastic, Dr. Marable perhaps took a degree of creative and editorial license, which is distressing to see in connection with a topic of such deep historical and cultural significance. The book is very valuable as a work of history, but as a historical portrait of a life, it perhaps reflects in some respects too much of the mind of the painter, obscuring to a degree the subject being portrayed.

As an aside, it is extremely difficult to correlate the citations in the copious endnotes with the text being referenced, as the hardback first edition inexplicably omits in-text endnote numbers, which is a significant problem in and of itself.

Despite all this, on the whole the book is a fascinating and lavishly detailed account of Malcolm's meteoric rise and tragic end that deserves close attention. It is regrettable that in chronicling Malcolm's "reinvention", Dr. Marable does some reinventing of his own, but the magnitude of what he accomplished in authoring a comprehensive and meticulously documented account of the entirety of Malcolm's life has to be recognized.

Ultimately, I can only suggest what I imagine Malcolm himself would have advised. Read the book for yourself and draw your own conclusions.

With no hyperbole Marable's last book provides a transformative view of Malcolm X ranging from little details to large consequential facts and events previously unknown to even a close follower of Malcolm X. Marable's years of research and scholarship is on full display with this, at times challenging, biography. It provides a greater breadth and understanding of the man who has become an international symbol and multicultural hero. During that myth building process the flesh and blood man was obscured. This book will help to reverse this dynamic by presenting several different sides to his personality, character and actions; none of which I will spoil in this review. As equally important, the reader is also given an understanding of why the image we have of Malcolm was developed. Why for example the old line that towards the end Malcolm X's and Martin Luther King Jr.'s thinking were gravitating towards each other is not especially accurate.

Mr. Marable's reasonable conclusions, especially within the last chapters, are a welcome addition to this already groundbreaking work. There are however a few instances in which his opinion seem not only unsupported by the facts but come out of left field.

Malcolm's evolving views on race are well known but just as interesting were his changing views about women. By the time he returned to Harlem from the Hajj his political and social views were in a state of flux that would continue until his murder. At that point the people that followed him out of the Nation of Islam had more in common with the Nation than they had with him. One difference in particular was his belief for a more inclusive role for women. This was one of the first stumbling points he faced when trying to build a working relationship between the members of his MMI mosque and secular civil rights organizations. Marable mentions Malcolm's deep affinity for the philosophy of Georg W. F. Hegel. Understandably than he wanted to synthesize these cultural differences and devise a workable situation. His inability to do this set the stage that led to his murder.

I think it's fair to say whatever form of Islam Malcolm practiced throughout his life; it had the effect for him as a liberating consciousness. It was a medium he wanted to use to uplift people, work thorough their differences, soothe their anger and alienation with the aim of creating coherent moral and ethical societies. When traveling in the Middle East and Africa he met with groups that ran the religious and political spectrum within the Muslim community that often were openly hostile to each other. His attempt to meet with these various groups was not just for support of his goals of demanding human rights for African Americans but to replicate his American goals for synthesis but on an international scale.

The fact of the matter is though many of his positions, but in particular his views about the role of women, were far more progressive than many Sunni Islamic communities that exist today. Were he to live longer he might have come across analogous problems on the international stage as the ones he faced in Harlem.

He was very simply a man ahead of his time. This biography's disclosure of some pointed shortcomings makes his ability, as the title suggests, to continually reinvent himself all the more admirable.

While the New York City Police Department and the FBI do not come off very well despite Marable's even handed assessment, it is the the Nation of Islam that rightfully comes under the most scrutiny. If Marable's years of research and numerous interviews with formerly unwilling subjects about the Nation are true than he has brought forth a devastating indictment against the Nation. Not simply that it isn't a Islamic organization (at times the followers prayed towards Chicago instead of Mecca) and that its idiosyncratic tenants are ludicrous on its face and are tantamount to a cult. But far worse their institutionalized culture of physically, sexually and monetarily exploiting it's members while doling out severe violent penalties for even minor infractions.

It's undeniably true the Nation succeeded in instilling a sense of pride, purpose and responsibility within its members. It appears though the Nation exploited that sense of pride within its members for its own short sighted aims. Marable's research explains how the Nation's leadership is as responsible for the murder as the individual members that carried it out.

The Nation's positions have been shown repeatedly to be on the wrong side of history. What else needs to be said about an outfit that found common cause with neo-Nazi groups and the Klu Klux Klan?

Read the book. It will stay with you.

I was however disappointed with the Kindle edition. It's not just that there are no links to the footnotes/endnotes in the text, but no footnotes/endnotes at all.

A great comprehensive biography for a complex individual whom Ossie Davis called "...our own black shining Prince." The dedication and research that Manning Marable put into this book is simply exhaustive... and it shows. From womb to tomb, the life of Malcolm Little is traversed here; from Malcolm Little born in Omaha, Nebraska, to Detroit Red, to Malcolm X , to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz.

In contrast to the "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" by Alex Haley, Marable claims his "Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention" includes information on FBI and police surveillance, details from lost chapters that were not included in Haley's book, access to speeches prior to 1950 and more context into Malcolm's activities concerning MMI and OAAU.

I see that this biography has come under criticism for potential inaccuracies. However, it is still a worthy read, as well as the published counter arguments and other biographies. One book or one author is not enough to contain this man and his transformation. It is up to the astute reader to disseminate and fashion together, from all sources, the legacy of Malcolm X.

Excellent book. If you've read the autobiography of Malcolm X, whether you liked it or not, this is a MUST READ!!!

It is a written as a biography not a semi-novel. Loaded with facts, and interesting quotes and interview from people whom until this book had remained silent, including Farrakhan.