Most Popular Books by David Margolick

“A fascinating, elegiac account” of the bond between two of the Civil Rights Era’s most important leaders—from the journalist and author of Strange Fruit (Chicago Tribune). With vision and political savvy, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy set the United States on a path toward fulfilling its promise of liberty and justice for all. In The Promise and the Dream, Margolick examines their unique bond, both in life and in their tragic assassinations, just sixty-two days apart in 1968. Through original interviews, oral histories, FBI files, and previously untapped contemporaneous accounts, Margolick offers a revealing portrait of these two men and the mutual assistance, awkwardness, antagonism, and admiration that existed between them. MLK and RFK cut distinct but converging paths toward lasting change. Even when they weren’t interacting directly, they monitored and learned from one another. Their joint story, a story each man took pains to hide during their lives, is not just gripping history but a window into the challenges we continue to face in America. Complemented by award-winning historian Douglas Brinkley’s foreword and more than eighty revealing photos by the foremost photojournalists of the period, The Promise and the Dream offers a compelling look at one of the most consequential but misunderstood relationships in our nation’s history.

The names Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan Massery may not be well known, but the image of them from September 1957 surely is: a black high school girl, dressed in white, walking stoically in front of Little Rock Central High School, and a white girl standing directly behind her, face twisted in hate, screaming racial epithets. This famous photograph captures the full anguish of desegregation—in Little Rock and throughout the South—and an epic moment in the civil rights movement. In this gripping book, David Margolick tells the remarkable story of two separate lives unexpectedly braided together. He explores how the haunting picture of Elizabeth and Hazel came to be taken, its significance in the wider world, and why, for the next half-century, neither woman has ever escaped from its long shadow. He recounts Elizabeth’s struggle to overcome the trauma of her hate-filled school experience, and Hazel’s long efforts to atone for a fateful, horrible mistake. The book follows the painful journey of the two as they progress from apology to forgiveness to reconciliation and, amazingly, to friendship. This friendship foundered, then collapsed—perhaps inevitably—over the same fissures and misunderstandings that continue to permeate American race relations more than half a century after the unforgettable photograph at Little Rock. And yet, as Margolick explains, a bond between Elizabeth and Hazel, silent but complex, endures.

Nothing in the annals of sports has aroused more passion than the heavyweight fights in New York in 1936 and 1938 between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling — bouts that symbolized the hopes, hatreds, and fears of a world moving toward total war. Acclaimed journalist David Margolick takes us into the careers of both men — a black American and a Nazi German hero — and depicts the extraordinary buildup to their legendary 1938 rematch. Vividly capturing the outpouring of emotion that the two fighters brought forth, Margolick brilliantly illuminates the cultural and social divisions that they came to represent.

Recorded by jazz legend Billie Holiday in 1939, "Strange Fruit" is considered to be the first significant song of the civil rights movement and the first direct musical assault upon racial lynchings in the South. Originally sung in New York''s Cafe Society, these revolutionary lyrics take on a life of their own in this revealing account of the song and the struggle it personified. Strange Fruit not only chronicles the civil rights movement from the ''30s on, it examines the lives of the beleaguered Billie Holiday and Abel Meeropol, the white Jewish schoolteacher and communist sympathizer who wrote the song that would have an impact on generations of fans, black and white, unknown and famous, including performers Lena Horne, Eartha Kitt, and Sting.

American author John Horne Burns (1916–1953) led a brief and controversial life, and as a writer, transformed many of his darkest experiences into literature. Burns was born in Massachusetts, graduated from Andover and Harvard, and went on to teach English at the Loomis School, a boarding school for boys in Windsor, Connecticut. During World War II, he was stationed in Africa and Italy, and worked mainly in military intelligence. His first novel, The Gallery (1947), based on his wartime experiences, is a critically acclaimed novel and one of the first to unflinchingly depict gay life in the military. The Gallery sold half a million copies upon publication, but never again would Burns receive that kind of critical or popular attention. Dreadful follows Burns, from his education at the best schools to his final years of drinking and depression in Italy. With intelligence and insight, David Margolick examines Burns’s moral ambivalence toward the behavior of American soldiers stationed with him in Naples, and the scandal surrounding his second novel, Lucifer with a Book, an unflattering portrayal of his experiences at Loomis.

The lawyer''s trade--from its noblest moments to its greatest blunders--is examined with rigor, insight, and wit by one of America''s foremost commentators on the law, New York Times columnist David Margolick.

At the age of 76, Seward Johnson, the Johnson & Johnson magnate, married Barbara Piasecka, a recent Polish immigrant 42 years his junior. When he died 12 years later, she inherited his $400 million fortune after a protracted. . . legal battle with her six stepchildren. This book tells the story of the contesting of that will."

From Vanity Fair contributing editor David Margolick comes this chilling account of Father Bernard Bissonnette, a priest accused of sexually abusing boys in a small Connnecticut town, and the decades-long fight by the family of a victim to bring him to justice.