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Summary: Excellent Historical Material!!!
Review: A book guaranteed to keep your attention! The information covered and unselfishly shared focused on a part of history that needed to be told. As I relived this period with Congressman Lewis, I felt his pain, his need to fight, his determination, but most of all I felt his suffering. As history was being told, one could definitely see a need to endure the pain and suffering as this courageous sharecropper's son did. Every blood shed, tears cried, lives lost and the bold and remarkable efforts of an individual, made a difference in society and that in return resulted in producing a strong, intelligent and memorable American Man. Read the book! You will obtain true history told first hand.
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Summary: a must read regarding the civil rights era
Review: after reading this book i have a much different view of the civil rights era. Mr. Lewis has revealed a fascinating view of the times as well as of himself. i have read several books about the so-called civil rights era and this is at the top. what makes it so good is that it is balanced and honest. buy it and you won't be sorry. even if you don't give a darn about this point in history, this is a wonderful story about courageous people and turbulent times. Mr. Lewis does not try to elevate himself above the many faceless people who gave their energy and their lives for what they believed in. one of my all-time favorite books period. buy it, buy it, buy it!!!!
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Summary: Walking With the Wind-an Inspirational Memoir
Review: All I can say is that I LOVE this book. It is a true and chilling first-hand account of the Civil Rights Movement. I suggest that everyone read this book. John Lewis is truly an American hero!!
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Summary: Americans struggling for simple dignity
Review: Americans struggling for simple dignity; for the rights all Americans were promised by the founding fathers, told complete with warts, with the power of a mover and eyewitness to it all. John Lewis treats us to an inside view of SNCC, its often turbulent association with SCLC, and it's ultimate demise from militant upsurters. He beautifully recounts students confronting both civil and bone-chilling authority with both success and failure.Riviting, and at once humbling as well as redeeming to know such heroic Americans exist that are willing to risk body and soul to defeat glaring wrong. Defeat wrong not by force, but by will power and moral courage. Americans at their best! A must read for every American, and an excellant companion to "Parting of the Waters. Thank you John Lewis!
Rating:
Summary: Americans struggling for simple dignity
Review: Americans struggling for simple dignity; for the rights all Americans were promised by the founding fathers, told complete with warts, with the power of a mover and eyewitness to it all. John Lewis treats us to an inside view of SNCC, its often turbulent association with SCLC, and it's ultimate demise from militant upsurters. He beautifully recounts students confronting both civil and bone-chilling authority with both success and failure. Riviting, and at once humbling as well as redeeming to know such heroic Americans exist that are willing to risk body and soul to defeat glaring wrong. Defeat wrong not by force, but by will power and moral courage. Americans at their best! A must read for every American, and an excellant companion to "Parting of the Waters. Thank you John Lewis!
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Summary: Amazing account of the Civil Rights Movement
Review: As a person born after The Movement, I hadn't even heard of John Lewis before I happened to be at an event where he spoke. I got to meet him and I bought this book. This is a truly special account of the Civil Rights Movement. First hand, from a man who clearly exemplifies everything the Movement was about. Not famous today like MLK and Malcolm X, but a true American hero. Everyone should read this book.
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Summary: It would have been really easy to have ego..
Review: But Congressman Lewis does not reveal it in his autobiography about participation in the civil rights movement. What we get instead is a brave highly motivated young man who put his belief into a free and equal society into action.; Lewis, who is currently one of the few southern democrats in congress has a record of defending the civil rights of all groups. Although I had always admired his voting record, reading about the seeds of activisim was very moving and touching. Braving arrests, poliice brutality, political apathy and confusion, Lewis and his friends were early disciples of Martin Luther King. Also interesting is the uncanny habit of rubbing shoulders with John and Robert Kennedy. Although revisionist history has cast some doubt on the actual motives of the civil rights position, Lewis fondly remembers both as American heroes. According to Lewis, both men were genuinely anti-racist, but were unpreppared to deal with dixiecrat resistance to intergration or the actual sight of segregation. Indeed,many readers such as myself still find the conditions under which Affrican Americans were expected to exist horifying. Although many books and memoirs have been written about the civil rights movement, Lewis attaches unparralleled grace. One can almost hear the representative personally narrating the epic journey himself.
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Summary: AWESOME AND INSPIRATIONAL!
Review: Each night I can't put "Walking With the Wind" down! Reading the autobiography of Congressman Lewis' life and work in the civil rights movement brought tears to my eyes and a heaviness of heart to realize that people hate their fellow man so much that they'd commit such acts of violence based solely on the way someone looks! Whenever I read a book like this, I think to myself: "Thank God someone went before me because I couldn't have done it!" The tremendous amount of bravery these people had is so inspirational and heart wrenching! Not knowing your enemey is one thing, but these people knew the enemy and what they were capable of and yet, they still persevered and triumphed. As an African American I am so proud of all those who sacrificed so very much, even sometimes making the ultimate sacrifice with their lives. Every American needs to realize the great courage these people exhibited to make this land a better place for us all.
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Summary: Kirkus Reviews
Review: Georgia congressman Lewis (with journalist D'Orso's help) crafts a passionate, principled, and absorbing first-person account of the civil-rights movement--dramatic, well-paced history fired by moral purpose and backed by the authority of hard time in the trenches. Lewis's childhood was the quintessence of post-Reconstruction southern black life. This son of Alabama sharecroppers grew up in a rural shotgun shack, picked cotton, matriculated in a tumbledown one-room schoolhouse, and faced Jim Crow segregation on every trip to town. His adulthood is the quintessence of the struggle to break that oppression. Lewis's itinerary during the civil-rights movement reads like a highlight of its most significant moments. You name it, he was there: launching the nonviolent student protest movement at the Nashville sit-ins, Freedom Riding through the Deep South, delivering the March on Washington's most controversial speech, serving time in Mississippi's infamously brutal Parchman prison, organizing the voter registration drive that brought Schwerner, Goodman, and Cheney to Mississippi, marching in Birmingham in 1963 and Selma in 1965. Lewis served as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and his analysis of rivalries between SNCC and the more mainstream, bourgeois Southern Christian Leadership Conference (headed by Martin Luther King) and his candid assessment of notable players (King, Stokely Carmichael, Julian Bond) serve as reminders of the movement's complexity. Gut-wrenching firsthand descriptions revisit the appalling brutality endured by demonstrators (Lewis suffered a fractured skull leading marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday). He memorializes not only the drama, but the patience and steely courage of "the days and days of uneventful protest" that laid the groundwork for big developments--and that risk being overlooked now. Lewis's faith in Gandhian nonviolent resistance is unshakable, as is his devotion to King and to the thousands of working-class! blacks who risked their lives confronting southern tyranny. A classic, invaluable blockbuster history of the civil-rights movement.
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Summary: The best memoir I've ever read
Review: I don't like memoirs. They're usually self-serving, ego-driven and full of cheap shots. Walking With the Wind is none of those. John Lewis and his co-author have crafted a marvelously told tale of the civil rights movement. Perhaps no one but Lewis, King and Abernathy could write about the movement with this scope. Lewis was there for all of it, from jails, to voting, to sit-ins. And he describes it beautifully with the perfect pace. I think the book's best chapters are the ones that cover what happened in Selma. I've read a half-dozen histories of the civil rights movement and none of them have recounted the Selma story better than Lewis does here. Lewis also gives us insight into several other movement leaders. Not even Taylor Branch (the Pulitzer-winning historian and journalist) tells us about Jim Bevel with this much color. Lewis tells fascinating stories about Diane Nash, Stokely Carmichael and the relations between SNCC and the other movement-leading groups. It's the kind of inside baseball a good memoir delivers. I'm thrilled that I read this book. It has greatly contributed to my understanding of the civil rights movement.
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