(Beacon, $28)
Jeanne Theoharis’s new book “challenges what we thought we knew” about Rosa Parks, said Kate Tuttle in The Boston Globe. In public memory, Parks was a meek Montgomery, Ala., seamstress who in 1955 simply felt too tired one day to give up her bus seat to a white man; following her death, in 2005, The New York Times called her “the accidental matriarch of the civil-rights movement.” In reality, Parks’s catalyzing role was no fluke: She had been a dedicated civil-rights worker for years before her brave stand triggered the Montgomery bus boycott. Theoharis’s purpose isn’t to expose Parks as a fraud; the author understands that opponents often smeared any civil-rights activist as a Communist. But she’s done history a great service by replacing the Parks of myth with a woman of true “flesh and blood.”
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Unfortunately, Theoharis’s biography is both exhaustive and exhausting, said Terry Hong in CSMonitor.com. A reader needs serious patience to push past the author’s “tedious repetition, fragmented chronology, and countless ‘might have/could have’ assumptions.” Still, at a time when a dispute about Parks’s personal archives limits scholars’ ability to study her life, Theoharis’s book represents “an essential addition to any library or classroom”—an important corrective that should enhance, not diminish, Parks’s legacy.