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Jonathan Eig

Biography

Jonathan Eig

Jonathan Eig is a former senior writer for The Wall Street Journal. He is the New York Times bestselling author of several books, including ALI: A Life, LUCKIEST MAN: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig, and OPENING DAY: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season. Ken Burns calls him "a master storyteller," and Eig's books have been listed among the best of the year by The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Sports Illustrated and Slate. He lives in Chicago with his wife and children.

Books by Jonathan Eig

by Jonathan Eig - Biography, History, Nonfiction

Jonathan Eig’s KING: A LIFE is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. --- and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. The bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself. He casts fresh light on the King family’s origins, as well as MLK’s complex relationships with his wife, father and fellow activists. As he follows MLK from the classroom to the pulpit to the streets of Birmingham, Selma and Memphis, Eig dramatically recreates the journey of a man who recast American race relations and became our only modern-day founding father --- as well as the nation’s most mourned martyr.

by Jonathan Eig - Biography, Nonfiction, Sports

Muhammad Ali was born Cassius Clay in racially segregated Louisville, Kentucky. He went on to become a heavyweight boxer with a dazzling mix of power and speed, a warrior for racial pride, a comedian, a preacher, a poet, a draft resister, an actor and a lover. Millions hated him when he changed his religion and his name, and refused to fight in the Vietnam War. He fought his way back, winning hearts, but at great cost. Jonathan Eig sheds important new light on Ali’s politics, religion, personal life and neurological condition through unprecedented access to all the key people in Ali’s life, more than 500 interviews, and thousands of pages of previously unreleased FBI and Justice Department files and audiotaped interviews from the 1960s.

by Jonathan Eig - True Crime

Drawing on thousands of pages of recently discovered government documents, wiretap transcripts, and Al Capone’s handwritten personal letters, New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Eig tells the dramatic story of the rise and fall of the nation’s most notorious criminal in rich new detail.

by Jonathan Eig - Biography, Nonfiction, Sports

April 15, 1947, marked the most important opening day in baseball history. When Jackie Robinson stepped onto the diamond that afternoon at Ebbets Field, he became the first black man to break into major-league baseball in the twentieth century. Americans were beginning to press for justice on the home front-and Robinson had a chance to lead the way. His swing was far from graceful. And he was assigned to play first base, a position he had never tried before that season. But the biggest concern was his temper. Robinson was an angry man who played an aggressive style of ball. In order to succeed he would have to control himself in the face of what promised to be a brutal assault by opponents of integration.

by Jonathan Eig - Biography, Entertainment, Nonfiction, Sports

Lou Gehrig was a baseball legend --- the Iron Horse, the stoic New York Yankee who was the greatest first baseman in history, a man whose consecutive-games streak was ended by a horrible disease that now bears his name. But as this definitive new biography makes clear, Gehrig’s life was more complicated --- and, perhaps, even more heroic --- than anyone really knew. Meticulously researched and elegantly written, Jonathan Eig’s LUCKIEST MAN shows us one of the greatest baseball players of all time as we’ve never seen him before.