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Outstanding
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Kirkus Reviews
A hallmark, essential to an understanding of the civil-rights movement, Dr. King and 20th-century America. [15 Dec 2005, p.1306]
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Outstanding
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Publishers Weekly
As a literary work, Branch's biography is masterful. [19 Dec 2005, p.54]
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Outstanding
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Boston Globe Eric Arnesen
Branch's massive and deeply impressive study is bound to attract new and large audiences, and rightly so. Like the times he covers in these pages, the story he skillfully tells so well is unceasingly fascinating and dramatic...And depressing.
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Outstanding
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Christian Science Monitor Erik Spanberg
At Canaan's Edge succeeds again and again because Branch manages to provide crucial context without sacrificing narrative flow.
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Outstanding
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Houston Chronicle Steve Weinberg
Arriving at more than 1,000 pages, At Canaan's Edge completes one of the most heavily researched, best written, compelling biographies in the history of book publishing. Is it a lot to absorb? You bet. But with its relentless chronological structure, sometimes day by day and even hour by hour, it can be absorbed in small doses, much as real life is lived.
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Outstanding
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The New York Times Book Review Anthony Lewis
It is a thrilling book, marvelous in both its breadth and its detail. There is drama in every paragraph. Every factual statement is backed up in 200 pages of endnotes.
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Outstanding
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Washington Post James T. Patterson
Even in hindsight, these remain difficult questions to resolve, and Branch may be wise to focus on describing the rushing streams of events -- letting readers cast judgments for themselves. At Canaan's Edge is a deeply researched book that completes a superior narrative trilogy of America's civil rights struggles between 1954 and 1968.
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Outstanding
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San Francisco Chronicle Dan Cornford
With a little patience, readers will find this an immensely rewarding book that persuasively shows that King fully deserves his iconographic status in history.
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Favorable
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Daily Telegraph
Branch is a much better and keener reporter, however, than he is an analyst, and his book falls squarely within the American literary tradition of which Bob Woodward is a famous exponent - the tradition of writing down the facts in meticulous detail without stopping to explain why they matter.
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Favorable
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The New Yorker David Levering Lewis
In the determination to omit nothing relevant, At Canaan’s Edge seems to keep the entire era in view at all times—immigration reform, media coverage of civil rights, education, the work of NASA, the Six-Day War, campus unrest, and much else. Such perspective yields fine insights.
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Favorable
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Salon Charles Taylor
The last section of this epic tale is fragmented in the telling, but that is perhaps unavoidable; the story itself is fragmented and thus, not as emotionally satisfying as the stories of the civil rights movement's earlier triumphs.
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Favorable
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Chicago Tribune
Fully two-thirds of At Canaan's Edge is devoted to King's increasingly desperate attempts to advance his democratic dreams amid the mounting chaos of 1966, 1967 and 1968. As King falters, so does some of the book's narrative drive. It's largely a practical problem: false starts and failed crusades don't lend themselves to compelling storytelling. [8 Jan 2006]
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Favorable
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New York Observer Matthew Schuerman
More so than his marriage to his wife or his friendship with the ever-wise Stanley Levison, King's relationship with Johnson is the most poignant in the book. [6 Feb 2006, p.21]
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Mixed
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The New York Times Michiko Kakutani
In aspiring to capture a myriad of momentous events that occurred during some of the most tumultuous years in recent American history, Mr. Branch has ranged far and wide across the political and social landscape, often resorting to newsreel-like summaries of developments, while pelting the reader with incidents and facts in the place of analysis and perspective.
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Mixed
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The Economist
Most readers will admire the author's indefatigability, but secretly wish he had done more sifting...Perhaps it is the burden of expectation that comes with having "won almost every major award", as the cover blurb boasts, that drives Mr Branch to make what would otherwise be a fine book so ponderous.
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Unfavorable
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Los Angeles Times David J. Garrow
Indeed, At Canaan's Edge offers disappointingly little new or original historical information.
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