#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - An intimate and revealing portrait
of civil rights icon and longtime U.S. congressman John Lewis, linking
his life to the painful quest for justice in America from the 1950s to
the present--from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Soul of
America
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND
COSMOPOLITAN
John Lewis, who at age twenty-five marched in Selma, Alabama, and was
beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, was a visionary and a man of faith.
Drawing on decades of wide-ranging interviews with Lewis, Jon Meacham
writes of how this great-grandson of a slave and son of an Alabama
tenant farmer was inspired by the Bible and his teachers in nonviolence,
Reverend James Lawson and Martin Luther King, Jr., to put his life on
the line in the service of what Abraham Lincoln called "the better
angels of our nature." From an early age, Lewis learned that nonviolence
was not only a tactic but a philosophy, a biblical imperative, and a
transforming reality. At the age of four, Lewis, ambitious to become a
minister, practiced by preaching to his family's chickens. When his
mother cooked one of the chickens, the boy refused to eat it--his first
act, he wryly recalled, of nonviolent protest. Integral to Lewis's
commitment to bettering the nation was his faith in humanity and in
God--and an unshakable belief in the power of hope.
Meacham calls Lewis "as important to the founding of a modern and
multiethnic twentieth- and twenty-first-century America as Thomas
Jefferson and James Madison and Samuel Adams were to the initial
creation of the Republic itself in the eighteenth century." A believer
in the injunction that one should love one's neighbor as oneself, Lewis
was arguably a saint in our time, risking limb and life to bear witness
for the powerless in the face of the powerful. In many ways he brought a
still-evolving nation closer to realizing its ideals, and his story
offers inspiration and illumination for Americans today who are working
for social and political change.
