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The second volume of Taylor Branch's ambitious history of Martin Luther King, Jr. and his times begins, approximately, in the spring of 1963 and ends two years later with the assassination of Malcolm X and the first events that culminated in the massive marches in Selma, Alabama in the early spring of 1965. This is narrative history in the grand style. As the author explains, "I have tried to make biography and history reinforce each other by knitting together a number of personal stories along the main seam of an American epoch" (p. xiv). In the first volume of the series, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (1988), Branch succeeded admirably