Malcolm X's autobiography is a fascinating portrait of a man trying to find his way in a deeply racist state, but it's also frustratingly incomplete or inaccurate in many ways: exaggerating his early criminal career, eliding most of his political activities over the last year of his life, and haunted throughout by the unknown influence of Alex Haley on the narrative and emphases. Manning Marable's biography would be a triumph on those grounds alone, but Marable has the added benefit of a historian's toolkit and the innumerable documents that have become available since X's death, especially FBI dossiers and others that Malcolm could have never had access to or known about.

Yet that also seems to sell Marable's biography short, as he lays out the story of a man searching for any way to fight the racial oppression in America—first pursuing religious black separatism, wading into political organizing, then switching to Pan-African ideology, and finally forging an alliance with the integrationist movement that he'd repudiated for so long. Far from erratic, Marable dramatizes the changes as a day-by-day process of a man trying to keep an ever-growing number of balls in the air, and the often-pragmatic steps that he took to keep going. X would not only modulate his rhetoric based on the audience, but also his ideology itself, often endorsing more radical steps when abroad but more cautious among traditional domestic crowds. That was how he tried out new ideas, and where he started to give the hints of changing views that would eventually lead to his break from the Nation of Islam.

Highly recommended.