Word: books
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...used to discuss the ceremony of Bar Mitzvah (a phrase, Christians will be interested to learn, which means "Son of the Commandment"). Some of the details even border on the esoteric: when the story of Joseph's temptation by Potiphar's wife is sung in synagogue, the book notes, the musical notation over the word "refused" is long and drawn-out, "suggesting that it was not easy for Joseph to turn away from this temptation...
Underlined Horror. Books like this tend to be ghostwritten, but Mrs. King wrote this one herself. The resulting weaknesses are also the book's strength. If there is an overabundance of expressions of gratitude to myriad friends, there is also much affection that might have been mawkish if presented in more professional prose. The story, moreover, is full of details: The Kings' eldest daughter Yolanda explaining at school that her daddy "goes to jail to help people"; the awed Martin Luther King Sr. listening to his son preach in London's St. Paul's Cathedral...
Curiously, the book is at its best when retelling familiar events. From the bus boycott through the Atlanta sitins, from the jailing in Birmingham to the assassination in Memphis, Mrs. King succeeds not merely by adding intimate touches but by providing a personal context within which the events of King's public life take on a deepened drama. "If anybody had told me a couple of years ago that I would be in this position," King once explained to Coretta, "I would have avoided it with all my strength. But gradually you take some responsibility, then a little more...
...displays the same dignified control she first showed on television at her husband's funeral. Then her restraint underlined the horror of the days following her husband's death. Now her spare narrative has the same intensifying effect-particularly in the final section on the assassination. The book offers no particular analysis of the tactics of nonviolence. Her portrait of Dr. King is not drawn with an especially clear or unbiased eye; wifely loyalty often robs him of the humanity of having faults. Dispassionate reportage is not her real purpose. Rather, she has undertaken to bear witness...
...Miss Mitford was left with a hollow and partisan book...