A well-written, very detailed narrative history of the early years of the civil rights movement, it is published only two years after “Bearing the Cross,” David Garrow’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Martin Luther King, and covers ground well cultivated even before the Garrow book appeared.Īnd yet, reviewers have hailed Branch’s more exhaustive coverage of many of the same events as if it were a long-awaited, pioneering event. The publication of Taylor Branch’s “Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963” (Simon & Schuster: $24.95) illustrates the unpredictable character of American racial thinking.Ĭonsider the book itself. It defies resolution because so much of its essence is illogical and absurd. Race in America may well be the ultimate puzzle. Bell, who enters a quiet dissent about Branch’s book, is the author of a number of influential books on race relations in the United States, including “And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice” (Basic Books).

Derrick Bell, who discusses the book below, is a distinguished black professor of law at Harvard University, mentioned often as a possible next dean of the Harvard Law School. Martin Luther King and the civil rights campaign are the subject of a massive and widely admired new book, Taylor Branch’s “Parting the Waters,” excerpted in View over the past week.

Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch