President Obama included Parting the Waters on his list of 10 books he recommends for future leaders.

It was honored with a Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a Christopher Award. The trilogy’s first book, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63, was hailed in Time as a “major accomplishment in biography as social history” and as “a paradigm of the new American history at its best” by Newsweek’s Jim Miller. a profound act of citizenship, scholarship, and storytelling as he brings those years to life and lets them speak their truth for the ages.” Tyson said, “Taylor Branch has become the most important narrator of America’s democratic aspirations…. Writing in The News & Observer, Timothy B. The King-era trilogy required more than 24 years of intensive research as Branch sought to illuminate not only the life of the man, but also the times in which he lived. His landmark narrative history of the Civil Rights Era, America in the King Years, has been compared with other epic histories such as Shelby Foote’s The Civil War and Robert Caro’s multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. Over the course of his storied career, author and historian Taylor Branch has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Lifetime Achievement Award, and a National Humanities Medal. “Truth requires a maximum effort to see through the eyes of strangers, foreigners and enemies.”

Pillar of fire taylor branch