Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson - Hardcover

Frady, Marshall

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0394575865 ISBN 13: 9780394575865

Publisher: Random House, 1996

Synopsis

Raised in the segregated South, out of abject beginnings in South Carolina poverty and illegitimacy, heir apparent to Martin Luther King, Jr., twice a presidential candidate, recognized on the streets of South Central L.A., Ghana, Armenia, and Damascus, Jesse Jackson is a figure unique not only in American politics, but in American history.  As James Baldwin noted during Jackson's 1984 presidential campaign, "His presence presents the American Republic with questions and choices it has spent all its history until this hour trying to avoid...And nothing will ever again be what it was before."

Marshall Frady has been given closer access to Jackson and his family for a more sustained period of time than any previous writer.  He has traveled with Jackson in the U.S., Africa, Russia, and the Middle East, and has conducted countless interviews with his colleagues and rivals of the last thirty years.  The result is the most astute and compelling portrait of the man we are ever likely to have.  Jesse is an enthralling journey that reveals the nonstop demands of character and sets them against the fundamental, dividing prism of race in America.

About this title

Review

No other biographer has come as close as Marshall Frady has to correctly telling the story and understanding the mind of Jesse Jackson, arguably the most fascinating figure in contemporary American politics. Frady, who followed Jackson for years and had extensive access to him, rarely gets in the way when recounting Jackson's remarkable history from his humble background in Greenville, South Carolina, to his stirring campaign for the presidency. Frady also explains how Jackson can be viewed as both a political egomaniac and a great moral leader, a biographical synthesis that shows how deftly Frady has captured his subject.

About the Author

A native South Carolinian, Marshal Frady has been a journalist for over twenty-five years, writing principally on political figures and racial and social tensions in the American culture, first as a correspondent for Newsweek, then for Life, Harper's, Esquire, The New York Review of Books, The Sunday Times (London), The Atlantic Monthly, and most recently The New Yorker.  In the 1980's, he was chief writer and correspondent for ABC News Closeup and a correspondent for Nightline.  He is the author of the acclaimed biographies Wallace and Billy Graham: A Parable of American Righteousness.  He is currently at work on a novel.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0394575865
• ISBN 13: 9780394575865
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 552