From a Wall Street Journal story by Paul Kix headlined “Five Best: Books on the Civil Right Movement”:

Parting the Waters
By Taylor Branch (1988)

1. It’s that rare work of exhaustive history that’s propulsive, the narrative forcing you to keep flipping pages even if it means flipping them well past midnight. “Parting the Waters” is the first volume of Taylor Branch’s trilogy on the civil-rights movement and Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.