David Garrow stopped short of the story in Bearing the Cross (1985). Taylor Branch stopped short of it in At Canaan’s Edge (2006). And just this month, Michael Honey stopped short too in Going Down Jericho Road. The “story” is James Earl Ray and the events leading up to his murder of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis and the events that led to Ray’s capture two months later.
Native Memphian Hampton Sides (Ghost Soldiers, Blood and Thunder) isn’t about to stop short. In his latest book project, Sides wants to pick up where the historians left off. A “big, multi-tentacled narrative” of “novelistic intrigue” is how Sides describes it. A “storyteller,” not a historian, is how Sides describes himself.
Read the rest in the Flyer’s book column by Leonard Gill.