Parting the Country

Taylor branch’s new volume is a major achievement—a product of prodigious research and a gift for storytelling on an epic scale. Taken together with his earlier Pulitzer Prize–winning Parting the Waters and his projected third volume, At Canaan’s Edge, Branch’s attempt to write “a narrative history of the civil rights movement” promises to be the most lucid and comprehensive account of the modern African-American freedom struggle that we will have for many years. Few historians can equal his narrative skills—especially his ability to dramatize events and delineate personalities. “I have tried to make biography and history reinforce each other by knitting together a number of personal stories along the main seam of the American epoch,” he explains.

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