Thick books. They'd better be great, because they sure are heavy. “The Power Broker,” for example, the Robert Caro biography of New York City potentate Robert Moses. A brick of a book, but when Butler sat down to read it, he raced through it as if it were a thriller. And, ever after, Butler remembers the book as if it were an experience.

Could you have this kind of experience reading about Martin Luther King? After all, everyone knows the King story in outline. Who hasn't heard the "I have a dream" speech? Or seen King in Alabama, marching proudly to jail?

Old story, to be sure, but when you hear it told day by day, as Taylor Branch does, it seems new --- an epic life unfolding in front of your eyes. Branch traces King's education, showing how teachers and writers shaped his thought. He introduces us to the men and women who became King's colleagues and takes the time to make them as real as King. And then, of course, he moves into the set pieces: the Freedom Rides, Birmingham, jail.

Branch, as a writer, is under King's spell; his prose has a cadence you don't often see in biographies, even in Pulitzer Prize winners like “Parting the Waters.”

Here's Branch on King's first great speech, delivered just before the start of the Montgomery Bus Boycott:

"The crowd retreated into stunned silence as he stepped away from the pulpit. The ending was so abrupt, so anticlimactic. The crowd had been waiting for him to reach for the heights a third time at his conclusion, following the rules of oratory. A few minutes passed before memory and spirit overtook disappointment. The applause continued as King made his way out of the church, with people reaching to touch him....In the few short minutes of his first political address, a power of communion emerged from him that would speak inexorably to strangers who would both love and revile him, like all prophets. He was twenty-six, and had not quite twelve years and four months to live."

And here's Branch on King in Birmingham: 'Having submitted his prestige and his body to jail, and having hurled his innermost passions against the aloof respectability of white American clergymen, all without noticeable effect, King committed his cause to the witness of schoolchildren."

And here's Branch on King's "I have a dream" speech: "It went beyond the limitations of language and culture to express something that was neither pure rage nor pure joy, but a universal transport of the kind that makes the blues sweet..."

Warning: If you have a kind thought for J. Edgar Hoover, it will be tested here. So will the reputation of John F. Kennedy. But then, everyone seems dwarfed by the central character of this first-of-three volumes --- as Branch tells us, Martin Luther King is our Moses. A bold claim. And yet, as you move through these pages, you'll be hard-pressed to disagree.

-- Jesse Kornbluth, for Head Butler

To order “Parting the Waters” from Amazon.com, click here.

Copyright 2004 by Head Butler Inc.