I watched the PBS documentary on him last night and it revived my interest in him. (The documentary was done “just in time” and no doubt to capitalize on the interest renewed by the Spike Lee movie- it featured interviews with his brothers, half-sister Ella and with Alex Haley among others, all of whom died very soon after). I’ve read the Autobiography as well as his daughter’s book* but would like to read a well researched and as objective as possible biography of the man. He is such an incredibly complex character (undeniably brilliant, one of the greatest orators and thinkers and most skilled debaters the nation has ever produced and yet at the same time capable of willfully & uncritically swallowing pseudoscience) and still so controversial that objectivity seems hard to come by, and the volumes I’ve flipped through in my library range from hagiographic (“Brother Malcolm could do no wrong”) to lifelessly academic (“Please excuse me while I regurgitate countless quotes and impress you with my arcane word usage”) but little by way of middle ground. (I think that a great oral biography should be done while enough of the people who knew him well are still alive.)
If you have read any books about him that you would recommend, please do so. Thanks-j
*Ilyasah’s book is fascinating in its own right but cast very little light on Malcolm X as, of course, she was a pre-schooler when he died. The oddity is that in reading of this large all-female clan living in white bourgeois suburbia it’s almost impossible to remember that perhaps the most controversial (definitely the most well spoken) critic of the white establishment was their patriarch.
**Speaking of the Spike Lee movie, the documentary has a lot more color footage of Malcolm X than I’ve seen in the past and copious amounts of his voice. I knew that Denzel Washington was a great actor but… damn. I swear that if you intermixed some of his scenes and some actual footage of the real Malcolm it would be almost impossible to distinguish the difference. How in the hell did Al “Hoo-wah!” Pacino win the Oscar that year?