Jonathan Eig – författare

PULITZERPRISVINNARE

I den här storslagna biografin skildrar Jonathan Eig medborgarrättsikonen Martin Luther King Jr. som en stor tänkare, en skicklig strateg och aktivist som ledde en av historiens största rörelser, och vars krav på etnisk och social rättvisa är lika aktuella idag som under hans livstid.

Författaren ger oss en inblick i en modig och ofta känslomässigt plågad persons liv. En pastor som brottades med egna svagheter och mörka tankar, en medborgare som jagades av sin regering och en man som var beredd att kämpa för rättvisan även om det visade sig bli en kamp på liv och död.

Med gedigen research har Jonathan Eig på ett lättillgängligt och levande sätt skrivit den första stora biografin på flera årtionden om Martin Luther King Jr., och den första med nyligen offentliggjorda FBI-handlingar. År 2024 tilldelades Eig Pulitzerpriset för King: Ett liv.

"... den mest kompletta och fullödiga biografi jag läst om medborgarrättsledaren / aktivisten Martin Luther King J:r ... King: Ett liv är en mycket välskriven, lättläst och komplett biografi." – Utdrag ur BTJ-häftet nr 18, 2025, Kent Lidman. Helhetsbetyg 5. (Briljant)

"Banbrytande ... King är en så nyanserad och ingående biografi att det är som om Martin Luther King sitter i ens eget vardagsrum." – Chicago Sun-Time

"King är lika fängslande som en spänningsroman ... Den i särklass bästa skildringen av Kings liv på mycket länge." – Washington Post

"Helt fantastisk ... King: Ett liv får läsaren att se King som något mer än en martyr, en ikon eller ett helgon – se honom för den han var, istället för den som folk trodde att han var eller ville att han skulle vara." – Boston Globe

"Ett sakligt och närgånget porträtt av Kings korta liv ..." – New Yorker

We know it simply as "the pill," yet its genesis was anything but simple. Jonathan Eig's masterful narrative revolves around four principal characters: the fiery feminist Margaret Sanger, who was a champion of birth control in her campaign for the rights of women but neglected her own children in pursuit of free love; the beautiful Katharine McCormick, who owed her fortune to her wealthy husband, the son of the founder of International Harvester and a schizophrenic; the visionary scientist Gregory Pincus, who was dismissed by Harvard in the 1930s as a result of his experimentation with in vitro fertilization but who, after he was approached by Sanger and McCormick, grew obsessed with the idea of inventing a drug that could stop ovulation; and the telegenic John Rock, a Catholic doctor from Boston who battled his own church to become an enormously effective advocate in the effort to win public approval for the drug that would be marketed by Searle as Enovid.Spanning the years from Sanger’s heady Greenwich Village days in the early twentieth century to trial tests in Puerto Rico in the 1950s to the cusp of the sexual revolution in the 1960s, this is a grand story of radical feminist politics, scientific ingenuity, establishment opposition, and, ultimately, a sea change in social attitudes. Brilliantly researched and briskly written, The Birth of the Pill is gripping social, cultural, and scientific history.

Lola wants a dog, but she's got some convincing to do.

A fourth book in the Lola Jones series about this energetic, compassionate, and funny third-grader who manages to teach the reader as she herself learns not only the words to a traditional winter song, but about life.

In the winter of 1950, Margaret Sanger, then seventy-one, and who had campaigned for women's right to control their own fertility for five decades, arrived at a Park Avenue apartment building. She had come to meet a visionary scientist with a dubious reputation more than twenty years her junior. His name was Gregory Pincus. In The Birth of the Pill, Jonathan Eig tells the extraordinary story of how, prompted by Sanger, and then funded by the wealthy widow and philanthropist Katharine McCormick, Pincus invented a drug that would stop women ovulating. With the support of John Rock, a charismatic and, crucially, Catholic doctor from Boston, who battled his own church in the effort to win public approval for the controversial new drug, he succeeded. Together, these four determined men and women changed the world.Spanning the years from Sanger's heady Greenwich Village days in the early twentieth century to trial tests in Puerto Rico in the 1950s to the cusp of the sexual revolution in the 1960s, this is a grand story of radical feminism, scientific ingenuity, establishment opposition, and, ultimately, a sea change in social attitudes. Brilliantly researched and vividly written, The Birth of the Pillis a gripping account of a remarkable cultural, social and scientific journey

BRITISH SPORTS BOOK AWARDS SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR.SHORTLISTED FOR THE WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR PRIZE 2017.SHORTLISTED FOR THE JAMES TAIT BLACK BIOGRAPHY OF THE YEAR.WINNER OF THE PEN/ESPN AWARD FOR LITERARY SPORTS WRITING.THE TIMES SPORTS BOOK AWARDS BIOGRAPHY OF THE YEAR.The most comprehensive and definitive biography of Muhammad Ali that has ever been published, based on more than 500 interviews with those who knew him best, with many dramatic new discoveries about his life and career. When the frail, trembling figure of Muhammad Ali lit the Olympic flame in Atlanta in 1996, a TV audience of up to 3 billion people was once again gripped by the story of the world's most famous sporting icon. The man who had once been reviled for his refusal to fight for his country and for his fast-talking denunciation of his opponents was now almost universally adored, the true cost of his astonishing boxing career clear to see.In Jonathan Eig's ground-breaking biography, backed up with much detailed new research specially commissioned for this book, we get a stunning portrait of one of the most significant personalities of the second half of the twentieth century. We are not only taken inside the ring for some of the most famous bouts in boxing history, we also learn about his personal life, his finances, his faith and the moments when the first signs of his physical decline began to show. Ali was a symbol of freedom and courage, a hero to many, but this is also a very personal story of a warrior who vanquished every opponent but was finally brought down by his own stubborn refusal to quit.An epic tale of a fighter who became the world's most famous pacifist, Ali: A Life does full justice to an extraordinary man.‘Ali: A Life is the business – 640 pages of patient scholarship and intelligent reassessment written in crackly prose’ Giles Smith, The Times  ‘[A] richly researched, sympathetic yet unsparing portrait ... Ali: A Life is an epic of a biography’ Joyce Carol Oates, New York Times

WINNER OF A 2024 PULITZER PRIZE IN BIOGRAPHY A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER*SELECTED AS ONE OF  BARACK OBAMA'S FAVOURITE BOOKS OF 2023*Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig’s King is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. – and the first to include recently declassified FBI files.  In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself.  He casts fresh light on the King family’s origins as well as MLK’s complex relationships with his wife, father, and fellow activists. King reveals a minister wrestling with his own human frailties and dark moods, a citizen hunted by his own government, and a man determined to fight for justice even if it proved to be a fight to the death.  As he follows MLK from the classroom to the pulpit to the streets of Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis, Eig dramatically re-creates the journey of a man who recast American race relations and became its only modern-day founding father – as well as the nation’s most mourned martyr.In this landmark biography, Eig gives us an MLK for our times: a deep thinker, a brilliant strategist, and a committed radical who led one of history’s greatest movements, and whose demands for racial and economic justice remain as urgent today as they were in his lifetime.