Starred Review Carson, director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project, brings together selections from King's writings, speeches, and recordings to create this fascinating "autobiography" of the famed civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner. The writings trace King's struggles with religion, philosophy, and the racial politics of the U.S. They reveal his youthful attraction to Henry David Thoreau's stance on the moral obligation to resist evil as much as to cooperate with good, and Mahatma Gandhi's teachings on nonviolent resistance to oppression. This work offers King's view on a number of thorny issues; on Rosa Parks and the bus boycott in Birmingham that launched the civil rights movement, for example, King characterizes her actions as spontaneous rather than planned, which has been suggested. He contrasts the racial milieu and tactics needed to address racism in the North versus the South and sees the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the culmination of the nonviolent resistance movement, as "first written in the streets" with the success of the protest marches. This stunning, passionate collection of writings also reveals King's impressions of other famous leaders of the time, including presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and activists Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X.