Dream makers, dream breakers
the world of Justice Thurgood Marshall
"We can run from each other, but we cannot escape each other. Knock down the fences that divide. Tear apart the walls that imprison. Reach out: freedom lies just on the other side." Those are the vibrant words of Thurgood Marshall - legendary civil rights lawyer, solicitor general of the United States, the first black justice of the United States Supreme Court. And here, at last, is the first major biography of Justice Marshall. Written by the prize-winning author Carl T. Rowan, in intimate anecdotes and an impassioned voice, Dream Makers, Dream Breakers: The World of Justice Thurgood Marshall presents an incisive portrait of the extraordinary life and career of this great figure who came to be known as "Mr. Civil Rights.". With unprecedented access to hundreds of closed files of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, drawing upon countless conversations with Marshall over their forty-year friendship as well as exclusive interviews with him, Rowan chronicles Thurgood Marshall's reckless early years in Jim Crow Baltimore, his triumphs with the NAACP as the nation's most renowned civil rights lawyer - Marshall changed America by winning the landmark Brown v. Board of Education school segregation case in 1954 - and his stormy twenty-four-year tenure as a United States Supreme Court justice. Dream Makers, Dream Breakers also contains sharply etched and sometimes angry portraits of the prominent Americans who dominated the world in which Marshall worked and fought. The "dream makers" include Earl Warren, Harry Truman, and Eleanor Roosevelt; the "dream breakers," George Wallace, Strom Thurmond, Richard Nixon, and George Bush. Marshall also speaks about his colleagues on the Supreme Court, and rates the presidents, putting Truman at the top and Reagan "at the bottom, the very bottom." Dream Makers, Dream Breakers is a riveting, absorbing portrait of Thurgood Marshall, a great man who has made America a better society.
Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.
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What the reading experience may hold
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Nonfiction
Use these as starting points rather than limits; the most memorable books often stretch beyond their catalog labels.
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Dark tone · Steady pace
Best when you want to settle into a longer reading experience.
A good fit if…
Readers looking for a substantial, immersive commitment with room for a world or argument to unfold.
This book's DNA
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A quick reading snapshot
Edition facts and catalog signals to help you decide whether this book fits what you want to read next.
- ISBN-13
- 978-0-3167-5978-6
- Language
- English
- Edition record
- OL24764203M
A more thoughtful way into this book
This guide uses the edition details and category signals above to help you choose deliberately. It does not replace the author's work or a full review.
Best when you want to settle into a longer reading experience.
Begin with its place in Nonfiction, then notice where the book resists that label.
Read for connection, not completion.
Mark one passage that sharpens the book's central concern and one that complicates it. That tension often reveals more than a quick summary.
Three questions to carry with you
- Whose perspective organizes the story, and whose perspective remains outside it?
- Which sources or lived experiences carry the author’s central argument?
- How does the book change the way you understand its larger subject?
Editorial framework by Wesley Bryan, BookenDeX Founder and Editor.
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