Too FastThomas Powers, London Review of Books Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable
Allen Lane, 592 pp, £30.00, April 2011, ISBN 978 0 7139 9895 5
How to be black in America was the challenge for spirited young men of colour who found their way to Harlem in the troubled years of the 1940s, when music, poetry, dance and art were giving way to drink, drugs, street crime and sex for money. Malcolm Little’s first impulse was to cut loose in the big city where he found himself soon after his 17th birthday in 1942. For a time he worked at Small’s Paradise, Harlem’s famous nightclub near the corner of 135th Street and Seventh Avenue. He had recently been fired as fourth cook on a Boston-to-Washington dining car, and had yet to learn to want anything more than a good time.
