King’s life just won’t stay in the past

     I don’t like to write in books. Even bound galleys — it just feels wrong. Besides, you still have to later find the page where the underlined passage appears. Better to slap a Post-It note by the parts you want to recall later.
     So when I pulled down my advance copy of Jonathan Eig’s “King: A Life,” which comes out Tuesday, I smiled. The pages sprout with magenta and orange notes. It’s been five months since I read it, before the King holiday last January. While I knew the book was interesting, I forgot just how interesting.
     So interesting that I don’t even have to check the citations to immediately remember riveting details, such as that for the first 20 years of his life he went by “Mike King.” That one fact alone might unsettle your entire view of what being Martin Luther King Jr. must have been like. Not the young preacher, waiting for the greatness he knew was coming. But just Mike, just a regular guy, maybe more sensitive than most, who threw himself out of a second floor window when his grandmother died. Twice.
     A man deeply flawed — he bit his nails, liked to play pool, liked to drink. King had a habit of plagiarizing, in school, in speeches and later books. He cheated in writing, and he cheated on his wife.
     Not a particularly flattering portrait of King, except for the civil rights part. Yet one being celebrated as the new standard King biography.
     “Magnificent,” wrote the Economist.
     “The most compelling account of King’s life in a generation” wrote the Washington Post.
     Why? Because life is messy. And those who keep alive King’s dream of a country where people are judged, not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character, know this must be done by facing reality, not concocting self-flattering mythologies.
     “Great men,” Eig writes, quoting Emerson, “have not been boasters and buffoons.”

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