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by: David Levering Lewis
List Price: $24.00Amazon.com's Price: $16.32 You Save: $7.68 (32%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.04960730092
EAN: 9780805068139
ISBN: 0805068139
Label: Holt Paperbacks
Manufacturer: Holt Paperbacks
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 752
Publication Date: September 01, 2001
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
Sales Rank: 113368
Studio: Holt Paperbacks
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
This monumental biography--eight years in the research and writing--treats the early and middle phases of a long and intense career: a crucial fifty-year period that demonstrates how Du Bois changed forever the way Americans think about themselves.
Amazon.com:
A pioneering sociologist, educator, essayist, activist, and political theorist, W.E.B. Du Bois was one of America's great intellectuals. This second volume by David Levering Lewis picks up where his Pulitzer Prize-winning W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race left off, chronicling his life from 1919 until his death in Ghana in 1963, on the eve of the March on Washington. 'In the course of his long, turbulent career,' Lewis writes, 'W.E.B. Du Bois attempted virtually every possible solution to the problem of twentieth-century racism--scholarship, propaganda, integration, cultural and economic separatism, politics, international communism, expatriation, third world solidarity.'
Lewis's lean and lyrical writing rescues Du Bois's stuffy, Afro-Victorian speech from historical documents, breathing life into his letters, memos, and numerous articles, both published and unpublished. He takes us through Du Bois's battles with the NAACP (which he cofounded); his ideological wars with 'Back to Africa' nationalist Marcus Garvey; his many Pan-African conferences; and his tours of Africa, Japan, Russia, and China. He probes deeply into many of Du Bois's books, including Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil and Black Reconstruction, adding marvelous new insights into the neglected novel Dark Princess. Lewis also details Du Bois's relationships with friends and foes alike, including James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and Alain Locke, as well as his triumphs, such as his acquittal in the infamous trial in which he was accused of being an 'unregistered foreign agent,' and his defeats, notably his failure to publish his Encyclopedia Africana.
A foremost authority on this great man, Lewis summarizes Du Bois as having 'an extraordinary mind of color in a racialized century ... possessed of a principled impatience with what he saw as the egregious failings of American democracy that drove him, decade by decade, to the paradox of defending totalitarianism in the service of a global idea of economic and social justice.' A reading of this magnificent work is nothing less than a reading of modern black America. --Eugene Holley Jr.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Good but not great follow-up
I just finished rereading DL Lewis's first DuBois biography, and am thinking about purchasing the second bio. I own a copy of the first, and did read the second bio as a library book. Reading the current reviewer comments for this book refreshed my memory somewhat about the second bio. I would agree with reader praise for the first bio; it is a splendid book, as good as historical biography can be. The second bio starts out well but ends up reading as having been rushed, which is probably what happened, ... Read More
Rating:  - Amazing Biography of an amazing man
W.E.B. DuBois was born 2 years after slavery was abolished, and died two years before the wide ranging civil rights acts of 1965 were enacted. During this century, America was transformed from a largely rural nation whose economy depended on agricultural production (not the least of which was the cotton grown in the south by slaves) to an urban nation with the world's largest economy, built on industrial production. Throughout most of this transformation, DuBois was the loudest and clearest voice proclaiming ... Read More
Rating: - Rush job at end
I agree with Schmerguls, above, that David Levering Lewis' vol. II of DuBois has too many typographical errors; the endnotes are a nightmare; and that it needs a bibliography. But the book is more than a flawed book about a flawed man. It is readable, in general; Lewis could have skipped some of the big words in favor of words that ordinary readers could understand without a dictionary simultaneously open. Lewis uses colorful, precise verbs in many cases and succeeds in bringing characters to life in one word ... Read More
Rating:  - A Flawed book about a flawed man
It seems odd that Lewis's biography of W. E. B. DuBois should be felt to be entitled to two Pulitzer prizes. The author disapproves at least on the surface of some of DuBois's more outrageous positions, but yet Lewis's biases show thru, and one gets the idea that in general if Lewis had not had the benefit of what has happened in regard to Communism in the past 15 years Lewis would be even more approving of DuBois's opinions than he now indicates. As others have mentioned, it is disconcerting to have a book from ... Read More
Rating: - Volume Two of the Magisterial Life and Times
With volume two Lewis completes his magisterial work chronicling the life and times of the controversial W. E. B. Du Bois, and this second volume is every bit as fascinating and scholarly as the first one which won the Pulitzer Prize. This volume follows Du Bois' descent from a founder and spokesman for the NAACP to his self-imposed exile in Ghana in 1963. Throughout the journey Lewis thoroughly develops the changing viewpoints Du Bois put forth as solutions to the problems of racial discrimination and the powerlessness ... Read More
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