A review by in_dee_d
The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne, Tamara Payne

5.0

Although Malcolm X is a name I've known since childhood, I am surprised at how little I actually knew about this man. Along with being informative and very detailed, this biography was utterly entertaining. As I read the chapter that listed all the plans Malcolm was putting in place after leaving the Nation of Islam, I realized that we lost more than we know. He had great momentum for building a pan-African coalition and a civil rights organization that could have been valuable for our nation as a whole. I felt real tears come to my eyes when I read about his assassination. I don't ever want to forget that along with being a great orator and activist, he was a human being, flawed and still learning. Malcolm deserved to see his babies grow up.

But this book does have its shortcomings. There are portions of this book that describe the important people in Malcolm's life with great detail, but it gives us very little information about his wife, Betty, and his children. Considering the number of pages spent detailing W. D. Fard's life (even though Malcolm never met the man) and the amount of information we learned about Sophia (aka Beatrice) and Laura, you would think the woman he married deserved more detail than a page or two in passing. *shrug emoji*