MARCH: BOOK ONE (graphic novel) by John Lewis and Andrew Aydin





Published in 2013 by Top Shelf Productions.
Written by John Lewis and Andrew Aydin.
Illustrated by Nate Powell.

Winner: National Book Award

Winner: Will Eisner Comic Industry Award

Winner: Coretta Scott King Book Award

Winner: ALA Notable Books

Winner: Reader's Digest Graphic Novels Every Grown-Up Should Read

Congressman John Lewis (1940-2020) tells his life story in this graphic novel, focusing on his struggles in the Civil Rights Movement. This is the first book in a trilogy, covering the first 20 years of his life.

Lewis is interested in three things as a young man - education, preaching, and the Civil Rights movement. Lewis listens to the traditional African American leaders and he hears talk of moderation (or, even worse, nothing at all about Civil Rights.) He doesn't know what to do, but he knows this is not the way forward. 

Lewis's growing frustration and the moment when Lewis hears MLK.
One day, he hears Martin Luther King, Jr. speak over the radio and he knows the way to go: non-violent resistance.

The last half of the book goes into the effort to integrate lunch counters in several department stores in Nashville, Tennessee. He details the training, the cat and mouse tactics and the way the movement grew and grew to the point that it simply overwhelmed the legal system. 

So, the legal system withdrew and let vigilantes try to deter them. Anyone who has studied the time period knows about the violence and how it ended up in the end, but that doesn't stop the reader from being drawn in. 

This graphic novel can be found on Amazon here: MARCH: BOOK ONE (graphic novel) by John Lewis and Andrew Aydin.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts over the last 30 days

THE BALLOT and the BIBLE: HOW SCRIPTURE HAS BEEN USED and ABUSED in AMERICAN POLITICS and WHERE WE GO from HERE (audiobook) by Kaitlyn Schiess

Image
Published in 2023 by ChristianAudio.com. Read by the author, Kaitlyn Schiess. Duration: 6 hours, 27 minutes. Unabridged. I first heard about Kaitlyn Schiess on one of my favorite podcasts: The Holy Post . She is one of the three regular hosts of the show and often serves as their in-house theologian. She is well-suited for this role because she offers well-considered answers and she thinks them through before she answers, rather than just shooting her mouth off - all the more impressive when one considers that she is by far the youngest member of the podcast. I was drawn to The Ballot and the Bible because: 1) I am concerned the rise of Christian Nationalism in America and the damage it does to the Christian witness; 2) I knew that Schiess would give thoughtful answers. The intermingling of Christianity and politics is not a new phenomenon in the United States (or in the rest of the world - but that is not the focus of this book.) Schiess looks at the intermingling of faith and politi
Read more

WINGS of HONOR (Forgotten Fleet Book 1) (audiobook) by Craig Andrews

Image
The premise of this book is not particularly original, but it still enjoyable. Originally published in book form in 2021 by My Story Productions. Audiobook published in March of 2024 by My Story Productions. Read by Shamaan Casey. Duration: 9 hours, 16 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: In Wings of Honor , humanity is at war with an alien insectoid species, much like in the book Ender's Game , the movie version of Starship Troopers , and the 1990's Fox Tv show Space Above and Beyond . In this novel, the bad guys (the bugs) are called the Baranyk.  The fight ebbs and flows - sometimes humanity is winning, but currently humanity is losing. Humans used to use a fighter/carrier system in which fighter space ships launch from carrier space ships to engage the enemy - much like another classic show and its reboot,  Battlestar Galactica . The death rate for fighter pilots were atrocious so the fleet developed a sophisticated fleet of drone fighter ships. If the drone ship gets destroyed t
Read more

PRINCESS DIANA: A LIFE from BEGINNING to END(BIOGRAPHIES of BRITISH ROYALTY) (kindle) by Hourly History

Image
  Published in 2022 by Hourly History This was a very odd choice for me to read for a couple of reasons: 1) I don't normally enjoy the gossip magazine type of stories. 2) I don't follow the modern English royal family - I find them to be annoying. 3) I don't really follow the English royal family in the history books, either. Here's how we got here.  Hourly History offers several free e-books every weekend and I picked up the book on Princess Diana for some unknown reason. And, six months later I accidentally picked the Princess Diana book with my fat thumb while using my e-reader app on my phone. I could have removed the download, but I decided to just go with it. Turns out, this was a happy accident. I am not going to go over Diana's life story in this review. I will just say that this rather short biography (the publisher intends that its books take about an hour to read) was interesting and pleasant to read. A lot of it was information I remember just from bei
Read more

THE BREAKER (Peter Ash #6)(audiobook) by Nick Petrie

Image
Published by Penguin Audio in 2021. Read by Stephen Mendel. Duration: 12 hours, 10 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis Fugitive good guy Peter Ash is hiding out in the open in the city where his adventures began in book number one of the series - Milwaukee. In The Breaker Peter Ash has an assumed identity with very good fake papers. His girlfriend June has joined him, resuming her career as a reporter with the local Milwaukee big city paper. Of course, his friend Lewis is around as well. In the previous books Peter Ash is dealing with untreated PTSD from his time as a soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan. Too many searches in too many small confined areas has left him with severe claustrophobia. Peter is working on the claustrophobia, though. Peter, Lewis, and June are at the Milwaukee Public Market for lunch. It is indoors, but it is very open concept with a lot of open space above. He's been eating there to get used to being inside.  The Milwaukee Public Market Lewis and Peter notice a fig
Read more

WONDER CITY (graphic novel) Written by Victor Fusté. Illustrated by Jared Cullum

Image
Published by Insight Kids in 2022. Synopsis: Teenager Alex Riley and her older sister Elizabeth are very different kinds of people. They are the daughters of a adventurous married couple who turned their adventures as archaeologists into a TV action adventure cartoon. Think of them as the archaeologist versions of Steve Irwin (the Crocodile Hunter) and his wife. Their mother passed away a while back and their father recently died in mysterious circumstances working on a secret project in the subway tunnels under New York City. Now they are having to depend on each other. The good guys sneaking into the network of tunnels and sewers under New York City When Mafia-type thugs show up to their place and try to steal notes their father had written while working on his secret project in the subway they know someone has been lying to them about their father's project... My review: I liked Wonder City well enough, especially at first. There are strong characters, interesting art, and Ther
Read more

LIFE AFTER POWER: SEVEN PRESIDENTS and THEIR SEARCH for PURPOSE BEYOND the WHITE HOUSE (audiobook) by Jared Cohen

Image
Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in 2024. Read by Kevin R. Free. Duration: 14 hours, 4 minutes. Unabridged. In Life After Power Presidential historian Jared Cohen looks into the post-Presidential lives of seven Presidents and their quests for some sort of meaning after having one of the most important jobs you can have. Some Presidents fade away due to health reasons, like Reagan. Others are eager to resume their former lives, like Washington. But, others still feel like they have something more to offer or have unfulfilled goals. The seven Presidents he looked at are: Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Grover Cleveland, William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter, and George W. Bush. I have enjoyed hearing about John Quincy Adams' post-Presidential life ever since I first read John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage  30+ years ago. I've read more than one book about him and this re-telling is quite good.  A photo of John Quincy Adams  taken in 1844. Jimmy Carte
Read more

The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents from Wilson to Obama (P.I.G. Series) by Steven F. Hayward

Image
An entertaining read and a great way to rate the presidents Published in 2012 by Regnery Publishing, Inc. First and foremost, the latest entry in the P.I.G. series is a great read. Steven Hayward is to be commended for making what could have been a very stale read into an entertaining read - he has a light touch. Secondly, how sad is it that grading presidents by how well they "preserve, protect, and defend" the constitution is a unique idea? Hayward begins The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents with a look at what the founders wrote about the office of the president and compares that to the modern presidency. He then looks at the presidency in the 19th century and how most presidents took the restrictions of the Constitution very seriously. As Hayward proceeds to grade the 17 presidents we have had from 1913 until the 2012 (from Wilson to Obama) on an A to F scale (just like in school) he gives a thumbnail sketch of each president with the major issu
Read more

IT'S SUPERMAN (audiobook) by Tom De Haven

Image
How Hard Is It to Nail Down Superman's Personality? Published by GraphicAudio in March of 2014 Adapted from the novel It's Superman by Tom De Haven Multicast performance Duration; Approximately 7 hours Let me be clear from the beginning about two things: 1) I am a Superman fan 2) I do not mind re-makes or re-interpretations so long as they are done respectfully of the source material. However, It's Superman does not do that, with the exception of Lex Luthor. This re-imagined world of Superman is set in the 1930s, which I liked as a choice because that's when Superman was created. Most of the first part of the book deals with a struggling Lois Lane living with a a freelance photographer named Willi Berg in an apartment in New York City (the book dispenses with the Metropolis conceit). Lois is much more worldly than I have ever seen her, but I was fine with that.  Willi Berg witnesses Lex Luthor, a New York City politician, in the middle of a crime and d
Read more

WHAT CAUSED the CIVIL WAR: REFLECTIONS on the SOUTH and SOUTHERN HISTORY by Edward L. Ayers

Image
Published in 2005 by W.W. Norton and Company This wonderful set of nine essays is just about as complete of a discussion of the South, the Civil War, Reconstruction, family, home, historical research and some practical applications of the lessons of the Civil War for us today as I have read . It seems to me that most of these essays have been published somewhere else first. That being said, Ayers has arranged the essays in What Caused the Civil War in a rough chronological order based not on the historical topic of the essay but on Ayers's own life. He starts with his own childhood in Eastern Tennessee and Western North Carolina and his own growing understand of what it means to be a Southerner. As the essays go along, Ayers goes to college, travels the world a bit and eventually returns to the South to do research and eventually teach at the University of Virginia.  As Ayers moves through his education and his career he develops a perspective on the Civil War and that pers
Read more

THE PRINCESS, the SCOUNDREL, and the FARM BOY by Alexandra Bracken

Image
  Published in 2019 by Disney LucasFilm Press. The Princess, the Scoundrel, and the Farm Boy is a YA re-telling of Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope.  It is told from the perspective of three different characters: Princess Leia, Han Solo and Luke Skywalker - in that order. The book starts out, like the movie, with the attack of Leia's ship and the fight as stormtroopers board it and stays with her through the destruction of Alderaan. The middle of the book starts with Han in the cantina looking at the results of Ben Kenobi's handiwork with a light saber. It stays with Han until they escape from the Death Star. At that point, it switches to Luke and stays with him until the end. This is more than a simple re-telling of the movie, though. That book was already written by George Lucas (ghost-written by Alan Dean Foster) a long time ago. There are lots of direct quotes from the movie ("I recognized your foul stench when I was brought on board." "That's no moon..
Read more