Hellhound on his Trail (History) Hampton Sides.

 

So impressed was I by the previous book that I sprinted to the library and grabbed another one by the same author. It was nearly as good. It tells the intertwined stories of Martin Luther King and James Earl Ray in the period leading up to Ray’s murder of King and their almost equally fascinating denouements. Some parts of it (the Ray thread) reminded me of Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song and that is high praise from me.

My most poignant memory of this book is the scene where King and his brother talk to their mother on the telephone and play what seems to be a traditional game in their family of taking on one another’s identities to confuse her. So very human. 

King was the only orator of international status since Winston Churchill and I find it infinitely depressing that his great “I Have a Dream” speech has now been sidelined by the sneers of the “woke”.

Something has to be done about the plague of subtitles that has infected the publishing industry.   Sadly, Mr Sides seems to have caught the bug. This book's is "The Electrifying account of the Largest Manhunt in American History" while the previous one's was "The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette".  At least neither of them  includes the word “genius” (as an adjective) or “epic” or "adorable". Perhaps there’s still hope.