Mark Whitaker:
Because he told his personal story, right?
So, even if you don’t believe his politics or you don’t know that much about what he stood for, just his remarkable evolution, losing his parents at a young age, leaving school, becoming a street hustler, going to prison, then embracing the Nation of Islam, becoming this very controversial figure, but then, in the last year of his life, leaving the Nation of Islam, changing a lot of his views about white people and separatism and so forth, traveling the world, reaching out, becoming more of sort of a global figure.
When you think about it, there aren’t a lot of men of his historical stature where you get that intimate portrait of them that you do in that book.
