I don’t know when or if I will get a chance to read and review Colin Grant’s Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey from Oxford University Press due to come out in March. 544 pp. $17.95. But I appreciate the folks at Oxford for sending me a copy. I skimmed through the book and check out the bibliography and it looks like a lively narrative and well researched.
From the Publisher:
The story of Marcus Garvey, the charismatic and tireless black leader who had a meteoric rise and fall in the late 1910s and early ’20s, makes for enthralling reading, and Garvey has found an engaging and objective biographer in Colin Grant… Grant’s book is not all politics, ideology, money and lawsuits. It is also an engrossing social history… Negro With a Hat is an achievement on a scale Garvey might have appreciated. Dazzling, definitive biography of the controversial activist who led the 1920s ‘Back to Africa’ movement… Grant’s learned passion for his subject shimmers on every page. A riveting and well-wrought volume that places Garvey solidly in the pantheon of important 20th-century black leaders. This splendid book is certain to become the definitive biography. Garvey was a dreamer and a doer; Grant captures the fascination of both.” Grant’s strength lies in his ability to re-create political moods and offer compelling sketches of colorful individuals and their organizations… An engaging and readable introduction to a complicated and contentious historical actor who, in his time, possessed a unique capacity to inspire devotion and hatred, adulation and fear. A monumental, nuanced and broadly sympathetic portrait. A searching, vivid, and (as the title suggests) complex account of Garvey’s short but consequential life.
