Enjoy fast, FREE delivery, exclusive deals and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery

List Price: $19.99 Details

Save: $3.00 (15%)

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime FREE Returns

FREE delivery Friday, June 30 on orders shipped by Amazon over $25

Or fastest delivery Thursday, June 29. Order within 7 hrs 16 mins

Select delivery location

Only 18 left in stock (more on the way)

[{"displayPrice":"$16.99","priceAmount":16.99,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"16","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"99","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"rWDV3WEsH69oxjfF%2BsHDahRoKMApzuduIHFCMp6wLDE2mKcEzn9CEqUaV8o5iuOJK%2FDEOF81Tlws0KwpG2lUdenswtQgHTl6QMYk8BB9tAnxd5KDirPtdKAt0BP%2BPjiZH%2FyQNHtKuSfd5jJb6rs2Rg%3D%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":0},{"displayPrice":"$11.95","priceAmount":11.95,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"11","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"95","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"rWDV3WEsH69oxjfF%2BsHDahRoKMApzuduGOMhXmrKyT%2ByvlGRPnUNOVZCxn89SxGxGr0mBBwteUZEPMmkbK%2FsVC1QjHaxY129PCwi9VW3Le04VDSJnvufdeDf2EaANdXUmZp%2Fzohdtbf8tQc3UCkuQlkXdZh9ERiYzl2BYZ%2FIHwpPHcEiK%2FmL7eOINpugOkby","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"USED","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":0}]

$$16.99 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Payment

Secure transaction

Ships from

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Returns

Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt

Details

Payment

Secure transaction

We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more

Ships from

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Returns

Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt

This item can be returned in its original condition for a full refund or replacement within 30 days of receipt.

Read full return policy

Add a gift receipt for easy returns

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime

FREE delivery Friday, June 30 on orders shipped by Amazon over $25

Or fastest delivery Thursday, June 29. Order within 7 hrs 16 mins

Select delivery location

Used: Good | Details

Sold by Simple Shopper 1

Fulfilled by Amazon

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.

Have one to sell?

Sell on Amazon

Other Sellers on Amazon

Added

Not added

$18.18
+ $3.99 shipping

Sold by: Cyprus City Sales

Flip to back Flip to front

See this image

Follow the Author

Peniel E. Joseph

Stokely: A Life Paperback – February 9, 2016

by Peniel E. Joseph (Author)

4.6 154 ratings

See all formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Kindle

"Please retry"

$11.99

—

Audible Audiobook, Unabridged

"Please retry"

$0.00

$7.95 with discounted Audible membership

Hardcover

"Please retry"

$29.04

$2.10

Paperback

"Please retry"

$16.99

$14.29

$4.00

Kindle
$11.99 Read with Our Free App
Audiobook
$0.00 Free with your 3-Month Audible trial
Hardcover
$29.04

Other new and used from $2.10

28 Used from $2.10

3 New from $29.04
Paperback
$16.99

Other new and used from $4.00

50 Used from $4.00

15 New from $14.29

Purchase options and add-ons

From the author of The Sword and the Shield, this definitive biography of the Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael offers "an unflinching look at an unflinching man" (Daily Beast).

Stokely Carmichael, the charismatic and controversial Black activist, stepped onto the pages of history when he called for "Black Power" during a speech one Mississippi night in 1966. A firebrand who straddled both the American civil rights and Black Power movements, Carmichael would stand for the rest of his life at the center of the storm he had unleashed. In Stokely, preeminent civil rights scholar Peniel E. Joseph presents a groundbreaking biography of Carmichael, using his life as a prism through which to view the transformative African American freedom struggles of the twentieth century.

A nuanced and authoritative portrait, Stokely captures the life of the man whose uncompromising vision defined political radicalism and provoked a national reckoning on race and democracy.

Print length

432 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Civitas Books
Publication date

February 9, 2016
Dimensions

5.5 x 1.25 x 8.25 inches
ISBN-10

0465065589
ISBN-13

978-0465065585
See all details

Frequently bought together

$16.99

Get it as soon as Friday, Jun 30

Only 18 left in stock (more on the way).

Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.

+

$13.69

Get it as soon as Friday, Jun 30

In Stock.

Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.

+

The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

$17.79

Get it as soon as Friday, Jun 30

In Stock.

Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.

Total price:

To see our price, add these items to your cart.

Try again!

Details

Added to Cart

Some of these items ship sooner than the others.

Show details Hide details

Choose items to buy together.

Highest ratedin this set of products
Stokely Carmichael
166
Paperback
$24.00
Most purchased | Lowest Pricein this set of products
Malcolm X
18,162
Mass Market Paperback
$7.99
This item:
Peniel E. Joseph
154
Paperback
$16.99
Peniel E. Joseph
913
Hardcover
$17.79
Peniel E. Joseph
131
Paperback
$13.69
Peniel E. Joseph
52
Hardcover
$22.99
Kwame Ture
433
Paperback
$16.95

Special offers and product promotions

90 days FREE of Amazon Music Unlimited. Offer included with purchase. Only for new subscribers who have not received offer in last 90 days. Renews automatically. You will receive an email to redeem. Terms apply. Offered by Amazon.com. Here's how (restrictions apply)

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

Review

“An insightful, highly engaging and fluently written biography.”―New York Times Book Review

“Joseph's account of Carmichael's life is well-written and well-researched, providing persuasive explanations for his appeal.... Joseph's biography fills a huge void and is a welcome addition to the scholarly literature on the civil rights movement.”―Washington Post

“This is at its heart a book of ideas — ideas about power, freedom, and identity — and of a life, the author writes, that ‘took shape against the backdrop of a domestic war for America's very soul.’”―Boston Globe

“Mr. Joseph’s detail rich biography delves into the life of a political activist turned icon while not forgetting to show us his human side.”―Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Peniel E. Joseph’s newly published biography of Black liberation activist Stokely Carmichael not only takes its rightful place next to Taylor Branch’s epic trilogy The King Years, but also to one of the most powerful autobiographies by any American: Stokely Carmichael’s own Ready For Revolution.... Stokely: A Life is a quality read. By highlighting the life of one of the US civil rights/black liberation most important organizers and thinkers, Peniel E. Joseph has done a great service to history and to the people Stokely fought for. Furthermore, Peniel’s text has lifted Carmichael out of an obscurity he not only didn't deserve, but which also prevented a more complete understanding of a man who, with Malcom X and Martin Luther King, Jr., deserves to be recognized as one of the great leaders of one of the greatest grassroots movements for liberation in history: the Black freedom struggle in the United States.”―Counter-Punch

“Meticulously-researched and painstakingly-detailed, Stokely: A Life is a fast-flowing, informative read which intimately follows its subject from the cradle to the grave in absorbing fashion. In the process, this powerful portrait effectively re-positions him as an uncompromising prophet who played a pivotal role in the struggle for black equality.”―Afro-American

“A thorough and engaging account of one of the most important figures of the civil rights movement. Stokely achieves its primary goal of restoring Carmichael to his rightful place in the pantheon of influential Americans.... Offers delicious details, thoughtful analysis and a good amount of drama concerning this enigmatic figure.... Joseph’s landmark book is the best portrait yet of this important, complicated man and the America he so wanted to love but could not.”―Post & Courier

“An unflinching look at an unflinching man.”―Daily Beast

“A thought-provoking biography.... A brilliant bio with plenty of brio.”―Amsterdam News

About the Author

Peniel E. Joseph is the Barbara Jordan Chair in Ethics and Political Values, Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, and Associate Dean for Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of award-winning books on African American history, including The Sword and the Shield and The Third Reconstruction. He lives in Austin, Texas.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Civitas Books; Reprint edition (February 9, 2016)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 432 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0465065589
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0465065585
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15.9 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1.25 x 8.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #420,096 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #532 in Civil Rights & Liberties (Books)
- #1,438 in Black & African American Biographies
- #1,652 in African American Demographic Studies (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.6 154 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Videos

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload your video

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Peniel E. Joseph

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Dr. Peniel E. Joseph is the Barbara Jordan Chair in Political Values and Ethics at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and professor of history and the Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author and editor of six books on African American history, including the award winning Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative HIstory of Black Power in America and Stokely: A Life.

Professor Joseph is a frequent national commentator on issues of race, civil rights, and democracy and a contributing opinion writer for CNN.com whose work has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, NPR, CNN, MSNC, PBS NewsHour, and C-SPAN.

Professor Joseph is the proud son of Haitian immigrants who came to the United States during the civil rights era’s heroic period. Born and raised in New York City he stood on his first picket lines in elementary school and learned about Black history and social justice activism at the feet of his mother, a hospital worker, trade unionist, writer, feminist, and human rights activist.

Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5

154 global ratings

5 star
4 star
3 star
2 star
1 star

How customer reviews and ratings work

Sort reviews by

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

ead

Inspiring and comprehensive

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 21, 2023

Verified Purchase

I am so glad I picked up this book. It is beautifully written and truly inspiring. No idea why we don't talk about Stokely more. He was incredible.

Helpful

Matthew Vadum

Largely drivel, a cover-up of a radical who was hated even within the civil rights movement he claimed to be part of

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 17, 2014

Verified Purchase

A project is underway to rehabilitate the self-exiled Sixties radical, anti-Semite and “black power” advocate Stokely Carmichael.

The opening salvo in this revisionist project of the Afro-centrist Marxist Left in academia is Stokely: A Life, by Peniel E. Joseph, which was recently published by BasicCivitas Books.

It is more infomercial than biography, calculated to transform its negligible subject into a towering figure of historic importance, and to whitewash the damage he did. Joseph’s central argument is that Carmichael was a “rock star” activist who inspired generations and who singlehandedly changed the course of American history.

Perversely, Joseph calls Carmichael a civil rights leader. If that fairly summarizes Carmichael’s work, he was a civil rights leader only in the bizarre modern sense that racial arsonist like Al Sharpton is a civil rights leader.

It is difficult to imagine an American civil rights leader making common cause with ruthless African dictators but that is what Carmichael did. He changed his name to Kwame Toure to honor two of them. In his self-imposed exile he was a courtier to brutal racist tyrants. He was a friend of Ugandan butcher Idi Amin, and rationalized away the relationship by reminding himself that Amin was anti-American and anti-Zionist. Carmichael even accepted Ugandan citizenship.

He was also a friend of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi. Libya came closest to accomplishing Carmichael’s vision of a socialist state, according to Joseph.

It is difficult to image an American civil rights leader going abroad to help hostile powers, but this is what Carmichael did.

Carmichael visited Communist Cuba, giving aid and comfort to America’s enemies abroad. While there he called Abraham Lincoln a racist and helped Cuba’s propaganda effort against the United States. After spending three days with Fidel Castro he told reporters that the conversations he had with him were the “most educational, most interesting, and most enlightening of my public life.”

Carmichael praised the world’s most prolific mass murderer, Mao Zedong, as “a great Chinese leader, the greatest Chinese leader there is.” He palled around with Communist Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh and called for the U.S. to be defeated in Vietnam.

Not surprisingly, Carmichael was friends with Communist propagandist Howard Zinn and an acolyte of Nation of Islam demagogue Louis Farrakhan. Carmichael received political and financial support from Farrakhan’s organization.

It is impossible to imagine an American civil rights leader’s of the Martin Luther King Jr. era urging his followers to destroy their own country, but this is what Carmichael did. Revolutionary violence was the way to promote black power, in Carmichael’s view.

“It’s your town, if you want to burn it, burn it!” he said in a speech. “Don’t pray for power, don’t beg for power!” He called for an armed revolution capable of inflicting “maximum damage with a minimum of losses of black people.”

Although author Joseph strains to suggest Carmichael and Martin Luther King enjoyed a friendly relationship based on mutual respect and admiration, he leaves out his subject’s angry denunciations of King. As he urged blacks to seek “national liberation” from the rest of the U.S., Carmichael denounced King as an “Uncle Tom,” and rejected integration as a sellout to “white supremacy.”

Carmichael, who popularized the phrase black power, was a demagogue who believed that the ends justify the means. He was a leader who had no qualms about hurting other people on the long, blood-drenched road to utopia.

“When you talk of black power,” Carmichael said, “you talk of building a movement that will smash everything Western civilization has created.”

More moderate civil rights leaders at the time thought Carmichael was dangerous and possibly deranged. They urged that he be ostracized, treated as a “black Trotskyite.” Roy Wilkins of the NAACP said black power was a form of racism that could lead to “black death.” “It is a reverse Mississippi, a reverse Hitler, a reverse Ku Klux Klan.”

Professor Joseph, the founder and current director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts University, is ideally suited for the task of performing plastic surgery on Carmichael’s legacy. He isn’t a serious historian but a professional apologist for black racism. A devotee of the cult known as “engaged scholarship” — academic argot for leftist propaganda disguised as scholarship — he forfeits the privilege of being taken seriously by serving as hero worshiper instead of honest chronicler.

This vein of so-called scholarship is widespread in the academy. For example, Syracuse University-based Imagining America, a consortium of more than 100 colleges and universities, is devoted to rewriting the American narrative along the lines of Communist Party USA member Howard Zinn’s bestselling book-length fiction, A People’s History of the United States. The professor-propagandist boasts at his online home that he is “the founder of a growing subfield in American History and Africana Studies that he has characterized as ‘Black Power Studies’ which is actively rewriting postwar American and African American History as well as related interdisciplinary fields of Africana Studies, law and society, sociology, political science, Women’s and Ethnic Studies, philosophy, anthropology, literary studies, and American Studies to name a few.” [italics added]

Not surprisingly, the book itself is fluff more appropriate to the pages of Rolling Stone or People magazine. It papers over or downplays Carmichael’s many egregious flaws.

In reality, Carmichael was not heroic. He was a paranoid, racist, who was rejected by the civil rights movement he claimed to serve. He was widely hated across America — and distrusted by actual civil rights leaders — for his virulently anti-American pronouncements and his calls for revolutionary violence to be used to destroy both the United States and all of Western civilization.

His hatred of America was profound. The United States, he said, was “the most disgusting country in the world.” The Trinidadian-born agitator urged that black power be used not only to cripple America, his adopted homeland, but also to bring down the civilized world.

Joseph papers over Carmichael’s worst attributes.

He argues that Carmichael’s opposition to the existence of the State of Israel was misinterpreted as anti-Semitism. The fact that the activist praised Adolf Hitler as a “genius” did not make Carmichael a Jew-hater because he tacked on the proviso that what the German dictator did was “wrong” and “evil.”

He called Israel a proxy for U.S. imperialism and sided with the Palestinians over the Jewish state. He equated Zionism with racism before the United Nations followed suit in 1975.

But Joseph leaves out Carmichael’s chilling statement in 1967 that “The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist.” and launched the revival of overt anti-Semitism in the black left and eventually in the left generally.

Carmichael flirted with nonviolence for a time. He was elected chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or SNCC (pronounced snick) defeating now Congressman John Lewis (D-Ga.), an integrationist, for the position. As Joseph notes in a moment of rare candor, the decline of SNCC can be traced directly to Carmichael taking the group over in 1966, and turning his back on King’s legacy.

In a major unforced error, Joseph accuses the FBI of Red-baiting Carmichael. The agency “routinely investigated wild rumors and false sightings that connected the SNCC chairman to the Communist Party and related organizations,” Joseph writes.

But elsewhere in the book, the author describes Carmichael’s ties to Communist Party USA officials and notes that he attended Young Communist League meetings. So they weren’t “wild rumors and false sightings” at all.

Carmichael mocked calls for “integration,” saying they amounted to “a subterfuge for the maintenance of white supremacy.” Upon taking the reins at SNCC, he fired all white staff members and badmouthed whites who had backed the cause previously.

Around that time he publicly spoke of the importance of “offing the pigs” and “killing the honkies.” He urged the dynamiting of businesses and expressed hope that black U.S. soldiers serving in Vietnam would one day come home and “kill in the streets” of America. He encouraged blacks to riot in order to give white America “a little taste of chaos” and vowed that “[t]he Negro [was] going to take what he deserves from the white man.”

During his time as leader, or “prime minister” of the Black Panther Party, he urged the group to sever all its alliances with whites. Joseph ignores the fact that he failed and “this tactical disagreement led to Carmichael’s expulsion from the party and a ritual beating by his former BPP comrades.”He died at the age of 57 of prostate cancer that he accused the U.S. government of giving to him. That cancer “was given to me by forces of American imperialism and others who conspired with them,” he claimed.

But by the time of his passing in 1998, Carmichael was largely forgotten. He marginalized himself by emigrating to Africa and pursuing a political agenda that few cared about.

Even the New York Times, the agenda-setting, politically correct house organ of American progressivism, thought of Carmichael as a relative nobody when he died.

The newspaper published an unflattering obituary that essentially deemed the life’s work of Carmichael, who upon moving to Africa rechristened himself Kwame Ture, a waste of time that in the end had little impact:

“Mr. Ture, who changed his name in 1978 to honor Kwame Nkrumah and Ahmed Sekou Toure, two African dictators who had befriended him, spent 30 years in Guinea, calling himself a revolutionary and advocating a Pan-African ideology that evoked few resonances in the United States, or, for that matter, Africa.”

Yet Joseph portrays Carmichael as a giant of the civil rights movement who changed the course of history. “Carmichael’s bold antiwar rhetoric provided the intellectual and political contours for whites to engage in a global assault against American imperialism,” Joseph swoons.

Like a modern-day Obama zombie, the author characterizes Carmichael as courageous, intelligent, physically attractive, charismatic, and in possession of a robust sense of humor. It is reminiscent of the cartoonishly hagiographic treatment Kim Jong-un might receive in the North Korea press.

Joseph calls Carmichael “a rock star whose political speeches proved no less popular than a musical performance,” and likens him to John the Baptist.

Carmichael was not only “the most important black radical activist of his generation,” but also “the most effective and controversial activist of his generation,” Joseph opines, elevating his subject over Martin Luther King Jr. and the leaders of the various influential countercultural and political movements of the 1960s and 70s.

He played a “central role in reshaping domestic race relations and reimagining American democracy,” Joseph writes breathlessly.

“Through speeches, books, and interviews, Carmichael transformed the discourse on race, war, and democracy … [and] shaped the contours of civil rights and Black Power activism through participation in sit-ins, Freedom Rides, independent political organizing, and antiwar protests.”

Joseph’s comrades in the academy are fawning over the book, only too happy to help push this new narrative on an unsuspecting public.

Pseudo-intellectual race-baiter Michael Eric Dyson of Georgetown University is part of this push to craft Carmichael into a founding father of a new America. The MSNBC talking head calls the book “a magisterial biography of one of the most important figures in the history of the black freedom struggle in America.”

Following the Left’s playbook, which requires characterizing evil men of the Left not as evil but as complex and difficult to understand, Dyson said if Martin Luther King “was the King of civil disobedience, then Carmichael was the Prince of black revolution, and Stokely is the brilliant chronicle of his complicated and remarkable reign during tempestuous times.” Dyson lays it on thick, hailing Joseph’s competent but dull prose as the product of a “poetic pen.”

Al Sharpton’s Marxist political adviser, Cornel West, who is better known for palling around with Hugo Chavez and acting in two Matrix sequels, than for his so-called scholarship, predictably calls Stokely a “marvelous book.”

The book highlights “Carmichael’s profound love affair with Black people [which] made him one of the great revolutionary figures of the twentieth century,” says West, currently with Union Theological Seminary. West has also defended Farrakhan’s racism and anti-Semitism as reflecting a profound love of black people.

His reference to Carmichael’s “love affair” with blacks also brings to mind sociopathic tee shirt icon Che Guevara’s creepy aphorism about true revolutionaries being “guided by a great feeling of love.” (Carmichael identified with Guevara, who spoke of launching a nuclear attack against New York City, and referred to him as one of his personal heroes.)

The academic embrace of this anti-American, anti-Semitic race-hater is just another sign of how the left has destroyed a great institution and turned it into a propaganda mill.

(my review appeared at [...])

9 people found this helpful

Helpful

Rose White

Great read

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 16, 2021

Just reading

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 30, 2014

Verified Purchase

Magnficent chef d'œuvre (masterpiece)!

Among the finest biographies I have ever read, and not meant to be in any way self-aggrandizing but am desultory, voracious reader.

According to reviewers, this opus will once and for all end debates and an abyss plaguing the most important era of U.S. history: the civil rights movement.

Stokely should be on the same exact level as Malcolm and Martin (no disrespect intended by use of first, rather than surnames).
In short, read it, brothers, and all!

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Rainni

Must Read

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 12, 2021

Verified Purchase

Exceptional historical account!

Helpful

Lana Jean Mitchell

Ready for the Revolution.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 13, 2015

Verified Purchase

I just completed the reading of Stokely: A Life by Peniel Joseph. My thought, Peniel 's audience should find the book fascinating and an easy read. I would, however, recommend the reading of additional works about Kw3ame' Ture' and the Movement, to help them through areas that I found confusing on this first read.
One such area would be the discussions, pages 87, 88, 93, 96-99, 162-163 about the Lowndes County Freedom organization in Lowndes County, Alabama, that Joseph calls the Alabama Black Panther Party. The Lowndes County Freedom Organization is an independent political party. It's a political party like the Republican Party and/or the Democratic Party. Joseph's discussions confuses the Lowndes group and the Black Panther Party of California. However, in his epilogue Joseph does Kwame' justice with the following.: "Ture's legacy remains central to understanding a historical epoch with which our collective memory has yet to make peace. Ture's journey from civil rights militant and Black Power icon to the revolutionary socialist who unfurled the Pan-African banner high enough for much of the world to see indelibly changed the black freedom struggles." This is the Kwame' that I hope readers take away from Stokely: A Life.

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

Ken MacKay

A great civil rights leader

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 12, 2019

Verified Purchase

Haven't finished it yet, but he was great civil rights leader. I met him back in the day.

Helpful

Deborah Jacob

I quite enjoyed this biography

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 27, 2014

Verified Purchase

It was a difficult, complex time defined by anger and injustice, but Peniel Joseph manages to penetrate the posturing and public persona of Stokely Carmichael as much as possible both on and off of the political stage that he helped define. He gives ample attention to Carmichael's Trinidadian roots. I quite enjoyed this biography.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Jonathan

Lacking analysis

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 23, 2019

Verified Purchase

A well researched study of Stokely's political career and development but lacking the depth of political analysis I would have expected from an author who is a professor of history. For example there was no real debate about why he stood against John Lewis to be chair of the SNCC nor, more crucially, why he resigned a year later and the wisdom of this decision. It reads like a...what Stokely did &said next account at times.
However the book does get across his importance to the civil rights and Black Power struggle. It is excellent on his relationship with Martin Luther King. It also shows him to be right in his logic for supporting Pan Africanism, after all the working class in the "democratic west" are living on the cheap labour of farmers and factory workers in Africa and Asia.

One person found this helpful

mrjazzyd

Interesting read.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 23, 2018

Verified Purchase

The book was an interesting read and not someone you learned about at school or should I say I didn't.
A good read for learning a little more about the civil rights movement and the direction stokely Carmichael took.

One person found this helpful

See all reviews

Amazon Music Stream millions of songs	Amazon Advertising Find, attract, and engage customers	6pm Score deals on fashion brands	AbeBooks Books, art & collectibles	ACX Audiobook Publishing Made Easy	Sell on Amazon Start a Selling Account

Amazon Business Everything For Your Business	Amazon Fresh Groceries & More Right To Your Door	AmazonGlobal Ship Orders Internationally	Home Services Experienced Pros Happiness Guarantee	Amazon Ignite Sell your original Digital Educational Resources	Amazon Web Services Scalable Cloud Computing Services

Audible Listen to Books & Original Audio Performances	Book Depository Books With Free Delivery Worldwide	Box Office Mojo Find Movie Box Office Data	ComiXology Thousands of Digital Comics	DPReview Digital Photography	Fabric Sewing, Quilting & Knitting

Goodreads Book reviews & recommendations	IMDb Movies, TV & Celebrities	IMDbPro Get Info Entertainment Professionals Need	Kindle Direct Publishing Indie Digital & Print Publishing Made Easy	Amazon Photos Unlimited Photo Storage Free With Prime	Prime Video Direct Video Distribution Made Easy

Shopbop Designer Fashion Brands	Amazon Warehouse Great Deals on Quality Used Products	Whole Foods Market America’s Healthiest Grocery Store	Woot! Deals and Shenanigans	Zappos Shoes & Clothing	Ring Smart Home Security Systems

eero WiFi Stream 4K Video in Every Room	Blink Smart Security for Every Home	Neighbors App Real-Time Crime & Safety Alerts	Amazon Subscription Boxes Top subscription boxes – right to your door	PillPack Pharmacy Simplified	Amazon Renewed Like-new products you can trust

Amazon Prime includes:

Buy new: $16.99$16.99 FREE delivery: Friday, June 30 on orders over $25.00 shipped by Amazon. Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com

Buy used: $11.95

Other Sellers on Amazon

Follow the Author

Stokely: A Life Paperback – February 9, 2016

Purchase options and add-ons

Frequently bought together

What do customers buy after viewing this item?

Special offers and product promotions

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

Review

About the Author

Product details

Videos

About the author

Peniel E. Joseph

Customer reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Top reviews from other countries

Buy new:

$16.99

FREE delivery: Friday, June 30 on orders over $25.00 shipped by Amazon.

Ships from: Amazon.com

Sold by: Amazon.com

Buy used:

$11.95