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The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin
Doubleday
May 2010
On Sale: April 27, 2010
Featuring: James Earl Ray; Martin Luther King, Jr.
480 pages ISBN: 0385523920 EAN: 9780385523929 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
From the acclaimed bestselling author of Ghost
Soldiers and Blood and Thunder, a taut, intense
narrative about the assassination of Martin Luther King,
Jr., and the largest manhunt in American history.
On April 23, 1967, Prisoner #416J, an inmate at
the notorious Missouri State Penitentiary, escaped in a
breadbox. Fashioning himself Eric Galt, this nondescript
thief and con man—whose real name was James Earl Ray—drifted
through the South, into Mexico, and then Los Angeles, where
he was galvanized by George Wallace’s racist presidential
campaign. On February 1, 1968, two Memphis garbage
men were crushed to death in their hydraulic truck,
provoking the exclusively African American workforce to go
on strike. Hoping to resuscitate his faltering crusade, King
joined the sanitation workers’ cause, but their march down
Beale Street, the historic avenue of the blues, turned
violent. Humiliated, King fatefully vowed to return to
Memphis in April. With relentless storytelling drive,
Sides follows Galt and King as they crisscross the country,
one stalking the other, until the crushing moment at the
Lorraine Motel when the drifter catches up with his prey.
Against the backdrop of the resulting nationwide riots and
the pathos of King’s funeral, Sides gives us a riveting
cross-cut narrative of the assassin’s flight and the
sixty-five-day search that led investigators to Canada,
Portugal, and England—a massive manhunt ironically led by
Hoover’s FBI. Magnificent in scope, drawing on a
wealth of previously unpublished material, this nonfiction
thriller illuminates one of the darkest hours in American
life—an example of how history is so often a matter of the
petty bringing down the great.
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