“The Seminarian”
Patrick Parr’s book chronicles the time when King was “a cautious 19-year-old rookie preacher” out of Atlanta surrounded by a white staff and white teachers at Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, and living in a dorm formerly used to house wounded Confederate soldiers. Described as “the first definitive, full-length account” of a period “long passed over by biographers and historians,” the book describes the young King as a pool-playing “prankster” and sometimes incautious plagiarizer who fell in love with a white woman but, more important, embraced his exposure to new viewpoints and cultural backgrounds as he matured into the profound thinker remembered today. $26
“To Shape a New World”
Edited by Harvard professors Tommie Shelby and Brandon M. Terry, the book offers “careful, critical engagement” with King’s philosophy to help counter the misrepresentation of his ideas by right-wing commentators and those who benefit from a “romantic, consensus history that renders the civil rights movement inherently conservative.” $35
