manning marable had a difficult job to do. similar to spike lee doing his film with the fire and the heat of various constituencies figuring out what to make of this man that we love. even more so because this tries to grapple with significance of malcolm x it is an enormous work. i believe his magnum opus, that is saying a lot because manning marable wrote a great deal of brilliant things that have to be dealt with from some of his earlier stuff like capitalism under developed black america to his work on black politics. it is an extraordinary career that he had a vocation for trying to bring lucidity and clarity to complicated and difficult truths. i love this book. i read it and was privileged to read it before it was published. it is a brilliant insightful invigorating and of trying comprehension of an immoral human being has emerged american soil. colt malcolm the greatest figure of the 20th-century. some has been exaggerated and some has been generated from people's own sense of insecurity and frailty and homophobia and t

and the book we're talking about, manning marable's malcolm x, the life of reinvention, it's important for everybody out there to read it for themselves because manning is getting a lot of criticism from people who didn't read the book. >> right. >> and, remember, in the black community we cannot have sacred cows. malcolm had no sacred cows. everything was open for criticism if it was corrupt, if it wasn't helping people. that's why malcolm is the quintessential black working-class hero of the 21st century. so we can't say we can't criticize malcolm x. we have to be able to criticize all the icons that we look at. now, when we say that, is it constructive creatism or deconstructive creatism or destructive criticism? i think you can have constructive criticism. so personally i think -- do i agree with everything in the book? and no, like herb said, it's not a perfect book. but the bulk of that book, 95% of the book is about malcolm as a political figure, right? and the personal biography in the book is about malcolm as this gentleman that sonia said. the other stuff that we've talked ab

[applause] >> as we close the evening, i want to thank marable manning panel for being here this evening. and for marable manning who wrote this book as a man and scholar, and malcolm x life of invention, thank you all for taking your time tonight. [applause] >> thank for all of you for being here. and i thank you for coming tonight and i thank the library for coming here and i thank c-span for covering it. and letting you all know that it will be on weta next week. and get all the information you need on all of our guests and the books they've written and the work they're doing. thank you all for coming out tonight. [applause] >> manning marable passed away on april 1st, 2011, at the age of 60. just days before the publication of his biography of malcolm x. mr. marable was the director of the malcolm x project at columbia university. to find out more, visit columbia.edu/cu/ccbh/mxp. >> what are you reading this summer? booktv wants to know. >> well, i just finished decision points by president bush. and it was really good. i enjoyed the conversational tone that he took in describing his

manning marable suffered from psychosis and it's important to talk a little bit about the disparities so it's something that affects what people more than white but they get far worse. so manning had to have both lungs replaced and he wrote this book while dealing with the fact. so we don't talk about the active production, the act, the type of grinding it takes, like i wrote a little book that's coming out, these guys wrote several. every time you're dealing with some kind of crisis the fact able to do it and anything like this in his career is really a testimony. we have for rhodes as scholars. some are primarily mentors, some are premier li writers and some art teachers and some are institution builders. manning was all for. right? university colorado [inaudible] , colombia. he had a founded or developed a black studies program and did some of this stuff while i believe he was in his 20s so it's really important to talk about that process and how great of a scholar he was. now with that said, i think i'm going to be the role of the critic and that i believe that this work is the wo

up next, the panel discussion of the late manning marables discussion of the recent " malcolm x." >> there's a book about machiavelli that's sitting on my desk that came out several weeks ago. i want to read that book about machiavelli. and then there's a book called "reckless" which is about what went on in terms of the financial crisis in the country and what led up to it and involved two local businesses, freddie mac and fannie mae. so i have -- i know lots of players. i'm curious to read and find out what happened there. and then there's some thing that is i want to go back and read. you know there was recently a controversy about huck finn. and the use of the n word. and there was a professor who took it out of the text. and this sparked a controversy about sanitizing american history or in the context of my own book, sort of politically correct speech code and how inappropriate it was given the fact that mark twain, samuel clemons wrote it with the power of that word intended. so i want to just take a look at what the sanitized, if you will, text looks like. i've picked up that

i remember the night that the news came out that manning marable had passed away as in ann arbor michigan where i had never been before, that giving a talk about slavery and reparations at university of michigan. the woman who is hosting me was the person who told me about it. she teaches at the university of michigan in the last school in the afro-american studies department, a white woman and she immediately began to tell me about how manning marable had mentored her in new york. i didn't find it surprising to simmer in the heartland somebody was telling the story because of his tremendous influence. before i jump into talking about malcolm x come i want to say for me a good deal is that he wrote it. i would secondly say it's also significant that unfortunately released, but that this evening and others like it are important. i remember when the mother of emmett till died, she also had a boat she agreed to and she died it would unshredded week before out.ook came most of you have never read it because she was allied to do the publicity. it's a powerfully important book about what happen