I'm Gilbert Cruz and this is the Book Review Podcast. This week I'm joined by Jonathan

Aig, author of several biographies including Luckyest Man, the life and death of Luke

Garrig, and Ali Alive about Muhammad Ali. His latest King Alive takes on another American

great Martin Luther King Jr. In his piece for the Times Book Review, our critic Dwight

Garner wrote that the book, which he calls the new definitive look at MLK, was quote,

supple, penetrating, heart-string pulling, and compulsively readable. Jonathan spoke

to us from his home in Chicago.

Jonathan, thank you for being with us.

Thank you.

You've written several biographies of famous men. So how do you decide who you're doing

next? How do you arrive at this point in your career when you say, I'm going to do one

of the big ones.

You know, I don't have an answer for that. I'm following what I'm most interested in.

I'm following curiosity and passion and also looking for things that haven't been done

or where there's something new to say. That's really important because they're funny

of great biographies that really close the door at least for a while. And I thought, wow,

it'd be great to write about so and so. But that book came out five years ago and it's

excellent. And there's no room for another one yet. So you've got to sort of think about

it strategically too. And in the case of Martin Luther King, I found that I was talking to

people who knew King. And that just excited me. And then when I looked to see when the

last King biography had been published, I was shocked to see that the last straight forward,

you know, cradle to grave biography was 35 years ago. Stephen Oates's book, and there

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