By Coretta Scott King as told to Barbara Reynolds. This memoir is a bracing account of one of the civil rights movement's greatest heroines. It's no surprise to learn about Coretta Scott King's brave and bounteous spirituality, but she was also conflicted and complex. A leading pacifist of her era, King got in trouble as a little girl for hitting other children. She didn't want to date Martin Luther King Jr. when she first met him because he was too short, and even her husband failed to understand the profundity and the depth of his wife's inner calling. In one of the book's most painful passages, she recounts her self-doubt about how she handled talking to her children about their father's assassination. Henry Holt and Co. (2017), English, 368 pages.

King's decades-long friendship with journalist Barbara Reynolds yields a thrilling portrait of a woman who helped transform American morality while fighting both racial injustice and the men of the civil rights movement who consistently ignored, underestimated and undermined her. "This memoir is a tonic at this historical moment and a much-needed and ultimately uplifting refresher on what it means to be a principled American.  

Coretta Scott King was an American civil rights activist, international human rights champion, author, the wife of Martin Luther King Jr., and the mother of four. Born in 1927 in Heiberger, Alabama, she died in 2006 in Rosarito Beach, Mexico.