|
|
The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley (Mass Market Paperback) (Paperback)
by Attallah Shabazz (Foreword), Alex Haley(Interviewer, Malolm X (Primary Contributor)
| Category:
African Americans, Human right movement, Leadership |
| Market price: ¥ 108.00
MSL price:
¥ 88.00
[ Shop incentives ]
|
| Stock:
In Stock |
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
An amazingly powerful biography of the soul of America. |
| If you want us to help you with the right titles you're looking for, or to make reading recommendations based on your needs, please contact our consultants. |
Detail |
Author |
Description |
Excerpt |
Reviews |
|
|
|
Author: Attallah Shabazz (Foreword), Alex Haley(Interviewer, Malolm X (Primary Contributor)
Publisher: Ballantine Books; Reissue edition
Pub. in: October, 1987
ISBN: 0345350685
Pages: 496
Measurements: 6.9 x 4.2 x 1.2 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00643
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0345350688
|
|
Rate this product:
|
|
- Awards & Credential -
National Bestseller in North America. Ranked by Time magazine as one of the 10 Best non-fiction books of the (20th) Century. |
|
- MSL Picks -
Not only is The Autobiography of Malcolm X one of the essential texts of the last half-century, it is also one of the greatest works in all of American history. Period. It ranks up there with Moby Dick and the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. There simply is no way to overstate its importance. Its vivid descriptions of World War II era Harlem make it a rich historical document, and its meticulous detailing of the rise of Elijah Mohammed's Nation of Islam provides us with a crucial glimpse of one of the most galvanizing movements in recent history. Perhaps most significant of all, though, is Malcolm's personal journey from rage to hope. Sadly, it was a journey that his small-minded enemies could not countenance, so he was cut down in the prime of his life, before he had even reached the ripe old age of 40. In fact, Malcolm did not even live to see the publication of this book, the testament into which he had poured so much of himself.
There are two main reasons why this work resonates with so much power and authority. The first is the personality of Malcolm himself. By the time the book had entered into its final stages of drafting, Malcom had matured into someone who was capable of channeling his emotions into more productive outlets, and that ability certainly shaped the direction and tone of the narrative. Whereas the book could have been a tiresome tirade on the evils of white racism, instead it blossoms into a remarkable story of self-discovery in face of overwhelming odds. Malcolm the man shines through. The force of his charismatic personality practically leaps off the page, and there is no way to close the book without feeling as though you know him intimately.
The other reason is the personality of Alex Haley, the writer who took Malcom's narrative and constructed this masterful text. Not nearly as fire-breathing or charismatic as his subject, Haley provides the calm balance and equilibrium that keeps this story right on track. From Malcolm's impoverished boyhood in Michigan to his time as a hustler on the streets of Harlem, from his lengthy stint in the New York penal system to his final emergence as a major leader of black America, Haley's capable handling of such explosive material ensures that the story never stoops to the level of tiresome rant. In his wonderfully written epilogue Haley recounts the events leading up to Malcolm's murder, as well as his poignant Muslim funeral.
Doubtless this book will always be remembered and discussed in terms of its racial aspects, and that is as it should be. But The Autobiography of Malcolm X is much more than the simple attack on the white race that its critics make it out to be. It is a work which examines the American psyche with a critical eye and asks "who are we, and where are we going?" Though the book never fully answers those questions, it inspires us to as them of ourselves as well, and therein lies its greatness.
(From quoting G. Newby, USA)
Target readers:
Essentially readers of every country and every culture.
|
|
- Better with -
Better with
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
:
|
|
Customers who bought this product also bought:
|
|
Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little on May 19, 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska. His mother, Louis Norton Little, was a homemaker occupied with the family's eight children. His father, Earl Little, was an outspoken Baptist minister and avid supporter of Black Nationalist leader Marcus Garvey. Earl's civil rights activism prompted death threats from the white supremacist organization Black Legion, forcing the family to relocate twice before Malcolm's fourth birthday. Regardless of the Little's efforts to elude the Legion, in 1929 their Lansing, Michigan home was burned to the ground, and two years later Earl's mutilated body was found lying across the town's trolley tracks. Police ruled both accidents, but the Little's were certain that members of the Black Legion were responsible. Louise had an emotional breakdown several years after the death of her husband and was committed to a mental institution. Her children were split up amongst various foster homes and orphanages.
Malcolm was a smart, focused student and graduated from junior high at the top of his class. However, when a favorite teacher told Malcolm his dream of becoming a lawyer was "no realistic goal for a nigger," Malcolm lost interest in school. He dropped out, spent some time in Boston, Massachusetts working various odd jobs, and then traveled to Harlem, New York where he committed petty crimes. By 1942 Malcolm was coordinating various narcotic, prostitution and gambling rings.
Eventually Malcolm and his buddy, Malcolm "Shorty" Jarvis, moved back to Boston, where they were arrested and convicted on burglary charges in 1946. Malcolm placated himself by using the seven-year prison sentence to further his education. It was during this period of self-enlightenment that Malcolm's brother Reginald visited and discussed his recent conversion to the Muslim religious organization the Nation of Islam. Intrigued, Malcolm studied the teachings of Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad. Muhammad taught that white society actively worked to keep African-Americans from empowering themselves and achieving political, economic and social success. Among other goals, the Nation of Islam fought for a state of their own, separate from one inhabited by white people. By the time he was paroled in 1952, Malcolm was a devoted follower with the new surname "X." He considered "Little" a slave name and chose the "X" to signify his lost tribal name.
Intelligent and articulate, Malcolm was appointed a minister and national spokesman for the Nation of Islam. Elijah Muhammad also charged him with establishing new mosques in cities such as Detroit, Michigan and Harlem, New York. Malcolm utilized newspaper columns, radio and television to communicate the Nation of Islam's message across the United States. His charisma, drive and conviction attracted an astounding number of new members. Malcolm was largely credited with increasing membership in the Nation of Islam from 500 in 1952 to 30,000 in 1963.
The crowds and controversy surrounding Malcolm made him a media magnet. He was featured in a week-long television special with Mike Wallace in 1959, The Hate That Hate Produced, that explored fundamentals of the Nation of Islam and Malcolm's emergence as one of its most important leaders. After the special, Malcolm was faced with the uncomfortable reality that his fame had eclipsed that of his mentor Elijah Muhammad.
Racial tensions ran increasingly high during the early 1960s. In addition to the media, Malcolm's vivid personality had captured the government's attention. As membership in the Nation of Islam continued to grow, FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) agents infiltrated the organization (one even acted at Malcolm's bodyguard) and secretly placed bugs, wiretaps and cameras surveillance equipment to monitor the group's activities.
Malcolm's faith was dealt a crushing blow at the height of the civil rights movement in 1963. He learned that Elijah Muhammad was secretly having relations with as many as six women in the Nation of Islam, some of which had resulted in children. Since his conversion Malcolm had strictly adhered to the teachings of Muhammad, including remaining celibate until his marriage to Betty Shabazz in 1958. Malcolm refused Muhammad's request to keep the matter quiet. He was deeply hurt by the deception of Muhammad, whom he had considered a prophet, and felt guilty about the masses he had lead into what he now felt was a fraudulent organization.
When Malcolm received criticism after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy for saying, "[Kennedy] never foresaw that the chickens would come home to roost so soon," Muhammad "silenced" him for 90 days. Malcolm suspected he was silenced for another reason. In March 1964 he terminated his relationship with the Nation of Islam and founded the Muslim Mosque, Inc.
That same year, Malcolm went on a pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia. The trip proved life altering, as Malcolm met "blonde-haired, blued-eyed men I could call my brothers." He returned to the United States with a new outlook on integration. This time, instead of just preaching to African-Americans, he had a message for all races.
Relations between Malcolm and the Nation of Islam had become volatile after he renounced Elijah Muhammad. Informants working in the Nation of Islam warned that Malcolm had been marked for assassination (one man had even been ordered to help plant a bomb in his car). After repeated attempts on his life, Malcolm rarely traveled anywhere without bodyguards. On February 14, 1965 the home where Malcolm, Betty and their four daughters lived in East Elmhurst, New York was firebombed (the family escaped physical injury).
At a speaking engagement in the Manhattan's Audubon Ballroom on February 21, 1965 three gunmen rushed Malcolm onstage and shot him 15 times at close range. The 39-year-old was pronounced dead on arrival at New York's Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. Fifteen hundred people attended Malcolm's funeral in Harlem at the Faith Temple Church of God in Christ on February 27, 1965. After the ceremony, friends took the shovels from the gravediggers and buried Malcolm themselves. Later that year, Betty gave birth to their twin daughters.
Malcolm's assassins, Talmadge Hayer, Norman 3X Butler and Thomas 15X Johnson were convicted of first-degree murder in March 1966. The three men were all members of the Nation of Islam.
The legacy of Malcolm X has moved through generations as the subject of numerous documentaries, books and movies. A tremendous resurgence of interest occurred in 1992 when director Spike Lee released the acclaimed Malcolm X movie. The film received Oscar nominations for Best Actor (Denzel Washington) and Best Costume Design.
Malcolm X is buried at the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York.
****
Alexander Murphy Palmer Haley was born on August 11, 1921 in Ithaca, New York. He was the oldest child of Simon Alexander and Bertha Palmer Haley. At the time of his birth, his father was a graduate student at Cornell University and his mother was a music teacher.
As a young boy, Alex Haley first learned of his African ancestor, Kunta Kinte, by listening to the family stories of his maternal grandparants while spending his summers in Henning, Tennessee. According to family history, Kunta Kinte landed with other Gambian Africans in "Napolis" (Annapolis, Maryland) where he was sold into slavery.
Alex Haley's quest to learn more about his family history resulted in his writing the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Roots. The book has been published in 37 languages, and was made into the first week-long television mini-series, viewed by an estimated 130 million people. Roots also generated widespread interest in genealogy.
Haley's writing career began after he entered the U.S. Coast Guard in 1939. Haley was the first member of the U.S. Coast Guard with a Journalist designation. In 1999 the U.S. Coast Guard honored Haley by naming a Coast Guard Cutter after him. Haley's personal motto, "Find the Good and Praise It," appears on the ship's emblem. He retired from the military after 20 years of service, and then continued writing.
Out of the service, he tried his hand at journalism in the private sector. His first successful article was an interview that appreared in Playboy Magazine in 1962. Alex next worked on The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Published in 1965, it became Haley's first major book.
It was about this time his thoughts then turned back to the family story of the African slave that he heard as a child. His work on the story, which he knew he had to write, became a primary focus of his writing efforts. He details his many years of research in the last chapter of Roots. First referred to as Before This Anger, it was eventually published in abbreviated form in 1974 by the Reader's Digest. The completed version of Roots was placed on bookshelves in 1976. The award winning book and television mini-series introduced Kunta Kinte to the world.
Other Haley publications include A Different Kind of Christmas, a 1990 book about the underground railroad, and Queen, the story of Haley's paternal ancestors. Queen was produced into a television mini-series, which first aired in the winter of 1993.
Perhaps one of Alex Haley's greatest gifts was in speaking. He was a fascinating teller of tales. In great demand as a lecturer, both nationally and internationally, he was on a lecture tour in Seattle, Washington, when he died on February 10, 1992.
|
|
From The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature
Biography, published in 1965, of the American black militant religious leader and activist who was born Malcolm Little. Written by Alex Haley, who had conducted extensive audiotaped interviews with Malcolm X just before his assassination in 1965, the book gained renown as a classic work on black American experience. The Autobiography recounts the life of Malcolm X from his traumatic childhood plagued by racism to his years as a drug dealer and pimp, his conversion to the Black Muslim sect (Nation of Islam) while in prison for burglary, his subsequent years of militant activism, and the turn late in his life to more orthodox Islam.
(MSL quote)
|
| View all 11 comments |
Robert Boone (New York Times Book Review) (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-21 00:00>
It behooves us to read, and even reread Malcolm's book, and especially the last five chapaters, which describe the transformation that took place in his mind and heart after his break with Elijah Muhammad and the Black Muslims. |
Tom Hazel (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-21 00:00>
The remarkable story of Malcolm X inspires the multitude of readers, both youth and adult. He utilizes his words as weapons, in which he attacks the oppressor and renders understanding from the myriad black men in the United States. A true revolutionary, Malcolm X speculates and theorizes about the white man in America, informing the black community of the white man's unforgivable wrongdoings. But the power of his words, the power of his speech, the power of his diction proves inscrutable in that this one extraordinary man foments action, he foments change. He preaches that the black man must first unite with his race before successfully integrating with the white man. He advocates social and economical autonomy, and elaborates on his philosophy, which proves logical and pragmatic. Malcolm X simply loves his people, and wishes that they rise up against the oppressor and establish racial equality throughout the world. Inside this book readers will find themselves clinching onto his every word, and they, too, will gain a sense of awareness. And if the words of Malcolm do what they are supposed to do, then the reader, too, will take a stand and foment his own movement.
|
Ellie Reasoner (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-21 00:00>
I was always taught that an "autobiography" is written by its subject, but what do teachers and the authors of dictionaries and encyclopedias know?
Malcolm X's brutally frank autobiography, written by Roots author and fellow racial radical Alex Haley, chronicles the mid-century activist's nascence in the American Middle West, where his intelligence and willingness to work hard distinguished him from many of his lackluster peers in the hardscrabble rural ghettos where he and his family, headed in the wake of his father's suspicious death by a mentally unstable single mother, dwelled in dreary poverty.
Malcolm Little, as the subject of this book was known before his later serial name changes, was an insightful observer of his society and the inequalities present within it. His solution to the unbearable conditions under which his race were compelled to live was to go eastward, where he moved through several semi-legitimate jobs and finally entered into a life of crime, selling and using drugs, pimping women, and thieving from the homes of those who possessed material goods he and his criminal peers did not. Little began an affair with a white woman of, we are told, striking Nordic features, and was known far and wide at this time by his street name "Detroit Red".
Shortly after this affair began, "Red" and his accomplice "Shorty," were arrested for their crimes against society, and were sentenced to hard time in the state penal system. It was in prison that Little met representatives of a radical religious cult known as the Nation of Islam. The Nation of Islam advocated the rejection of non-black society, the eschewing of drugs and alcohol, a conversion to the Islamic religion, self-sufficiency of Negroes, and stood proudly on a platform that proclaimed whites were not merely genetically inferior to blacks, but were the root of all earthly evil. Whites were, according to secret Nation of Islam dogma, created on the moon by a mad scientist, and were therefore inherently malicious and God-less by nature.
Little at first belittled and rejected the message of these prison missionaries but later felt their dogma to be a solution to his and his peoples' ills. Little proclaimed his name to be Malcolm X: X being representative in mathematical theory of the "unknown" and signifying that his true family surname was lost in the diaspora of West Africans, taken unwillingly into slavery after the internecine wars and kidnappings that had gone on among the peoples there since before the time of the arrival of the white man.
During his racist indoctrination, Malcolm X began a course of study in which he read (my own favorite book) the English language dictionary, and had spiritual experiences culminating in full-sensory hallucinations of the Nation of Islam founder (and the man many cite as responsible for X's later murder) Elijah Muhammad being present in his cell with him. X challenged the moral authority of the white Christian minister in the prison and mentored impressionable young blacks who shared his life of incarceration.
Upon his release from prison, X's fanatical devotion to his chosen party redoubled and he rose through its ranks to become the Nation of Islam's "Minister" and personal disciple of the (Honorable) Elijah Muhammad: a figure whose self-authored biography made a series of claims too fantastic to be addressed in the space considerations here. X worked at recruitment for his group throughout the 1950's and early 1960's, championed its causes, and due to his charisma and courageous outspokenness, became something of a minor media celebrity. When the opinions of the Nation of Islam clashed with the non-violent, integrationist platform of the civil rights movement lead by Atlanta minister Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X steadfastly refused to concede that King's ideals were worthy of imitation and instead proclaimed that he and his Islamic brethren represented "the alternative" that was waiting in the wings to strike white America, should King's peaceful efforts be of limited avail. Full of anti-white hatred, it was during this time that X infamously replied to a young white student's question about what she might do to aid the cause of racial equality with a one word answer: "Nothing." A revealing look into the values and mindset of X when the subject of social healing was raised.
The beginning of Malcolm X's downfall as a darling of the mainstream news media establishment came shortly after November 22, 1963, when X jeeringly categorized President Kennedy's murder in Dallas as "the chickens coming home to roost." The outcry against X's words at this sensitive time was so jarring that Elijah Muhammad called X to heel and forbade him the media spotlight under which the publicity-loving X had thrived for so long. Further conflicts arose soon after when X learned Muhammad, a man X so admired he would gladly have surrendered his own life to save, had hypocritically failed to live up to his own teachings and had conducted affairs with (very) young women within the Nation of Islam, even fathering children out of wedlock, a direct violation of his own stance that sex outside of marriage was wrong.
When X publicly broke with the Nation of Islam, it was generally felt the philosophical young radical's days were numbered. X changed his name yet again, this time taking the Islamic surname Shabazz, and undertook a pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca. Little/Red/X/Shabazz returned from Mecca proclaiming himself a changed man. Pragmatically he retracted certain of his statements about whites being demonic and inferior to his own race and softened a number of his one-time stances, particularly those regarding violence as a tool of social alteration. Sadly, the former Malcolm X was destined to have scant time to explore his new views and was murdered by black radicals while speaking in New York City. The Autobiography was completed by X's friend Alex Haley who released it after X's death.
The impact of this book on many readers is reportedly profound and life-affirming, and I thought it was candid and informative and came away viewing X as a man of intelligence who strived to find understanding and better his race. I also saw how he was confused and impressionable and sadly fell under the influence of those who taught hate. Finally after reading this book I came to see how distorted the popular image of Malcolm X is, and became certain that should more whites read the Autobiography, X's iconic status as a champion of civil justice would likely be imperiled. He was, after all, a man who invested the most productive years of his life leading an evangelical crusade based on the most blatantly racist platform imaginable, the reverse of which no white figure would ever be praised for advocating. And rightly so.
|
K. Greene (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-21 00:00>
Malcolm is a Revolutionary, by all definitions of the term, his journey was cut short due to the very hatred that he spoke out against. In regards to many of the reviews of his autobiography I found that the majority understood where Malcolm came from, and how he came up from an orphan boy, common place thug, and ex-con, to become a socially conscience, activist and leading Minister of the Nation of Islam. But for the critics who think that Malcolm was nothing more than about spreading hatred against white people, their shallow and closed mindedness stops them from ever understanding what a true revolutionary such as Malcolm is. If there is one thing that he has taught me from reading his autobiography and speeches, is that a true revolutionary's feelings are inspired by the love that he or she has for their people, not by their hate for whites. We are soldiers, fighting in a war not because of the hate that oppresses us, but for our love of our children, our black men and women. Read the book, as many times as you can, find understanding in his message. Everyone can be enlighten by his words. Peace. Love. Revolution! |
View all 11 comments |
|
|
|
|
