A life of Martin Luther King Jr. told as a griot's performance: Flowers's text — Montgomery, Birmingham, the influence of Gandhi, the challenge of Malcolm X and Black Power, and King's flaws alongside his triumphs — is paired with Patua scroll paintings by Manu Chitrakar, a Bengali scroll artist, created in a workshop in India that fused West African storytelling form with a South Asian folk-painting tradition. The result is a biography of King unlike any other on the shelf: a Black American life carried in two of the world's oldest narrative arts at once. The book received a starred review from Booklist.
Author: Arthur Flowers; illustrations by Manu Chitrakar · Original publisher: Tara Books (Chennai, India), 2010
