A fascinating—and ultimately heartbreaking—story of one of the greatest Black figures to grace the civil rights movement. Yet Malcolm X had his own weaknesses: misogyny, occasional lurches into anti-Semitism, and an almost fanatical devotion to the Nation of Islam before he split from Elijah Muhammad.

To be quite frank, while his spiritual reinvention organizes the first two-thirds of the book, the parts where he evangelizes for the Nation come off as the worst (and silliest) parts of the book, almost akin to Ayn Rand's bloviating speeches. But his hustler background stands on its own for how well Malcolm and Haley capture the intoxicating glee at finding a way to thrive under the limitations he faced, even if those slowly turned to increasingly criminal pursuits. And the last third of the book, where Malcolm breaks from the Nation of Islam and re-examines many of his prior beliefs, realigns the whole book as the chronicle of a man trying to think things through. There's an intellectual honesty and openness to him that's just as endearing as his formidable personal charisma. Even some of his beliefs haven't aged as well as others, you get to see him thinking through his priors and eventually jettisoning many of his preconceptions thanks to his trip abroad.