Book Review: ‘John Lewis: A Life’ further humanizes a civil rights giant

In “John Lewis: A Life,” David Greenberg recounts how the late Democratic congressman reacted after Republicans scored a landslide victory in the 1994 election. A staffer hoped Lewis would buoy her spirits and tell her there was a silver lining.

Lewis instead told her, “There is no silver lining.”

Exchanges like this that reveal moments of despair and vulnerability by the seemingly eternally optimistic Lewis are partly what makes Greenberg’s biography of the Civil Rights icon so remarkable. It would have been easy to write a book that veers into hagiography for someone who became the nation’s moral authority on civil rights and a younger generation’s link to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Greenberg instead offers a more complete portrait of Lewis’ evolution and his political education. Greenberg conducted hundreds of interviews for the biography, including with Lewis himself, and that work shows throughout the book.

Greenberg sketches the familiar highlights of Lewis’ life, from a boy who preached to chickens on his family’s farm to an activist who sustained a fractured skull when he was beaten by police during the “Bloody Sunday” march that helped lead to the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

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