A review by marcymurli
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable

3.0

I think the book is quite interesting, although not because of Marable's skill as a biographer. I enjoyed the second half of the book far more than the first half, but mostly this is because Marable describes Malcolm X's travels throughout Africa and the Arab world and the ways it transformed his thinking about imperialism as a global struggle. What would really be an amazing book would be a collection of X's travel diaries from this period, which are quoted in the biography but not to the extent I'd like. Marable inserts himself too much into the biography, something that is particularly disturbing in the epilogue when he describes the impact X has had on the world. He conjectures odd ideas that he attributes to X and focuses on random and odd aspects of his significance (e.g., al Qa'eda). I would have much preferred a meaningful exploration of the way his ideas affected Stokley Carmichael and the Black Panther Party. I'm a bit surprised by these strange political remarks by Marable as other books I've read by him seem far more radical and astute than this one. But it is worth reading the biography for the glimpses into how X evolved as a thinker and an activist over the course of his far too brief life.