Charles L. Zelden's new biography of Thurgood Marshall is a deceptively impressive accomplishment. The book makes no pretenses about uncovering new information about its subject. It is a work of synthesis, drawing on the sizable secondary literature on Marshall, readily accessible primary sources, and a smattering of archival materials. Nor does the book offer a new interpretation of Marshall and his legal work. Although Zelden has certain themes that he emphasizes, his narrative generally tracks what is widely known and accepted about Marshall. What this book does, and does remarkably well, however, is to synthesize a great deal of information—this is a book that covers both the man and the many legal battles with which he was involved—into a portrait that is sharply written, effectively organized, and impressively concise (the text runs only 173 pages). This is no small feat. Zelden has given us an accessible and engaging introduction to Marshall and the central role he played in the legal history of the twentieth century.

Part of the Routledge Historical Americans series, this book is targeted at a student audience. In addition to being relatively short and written in clear, accessible prose, the text of the biography is followed by six well-chosen excerpts from primary source materials. Here one can find passages from Marshall's oral argument in Brown v. Board of Education and Cooper v Aaron (the Little Rock school desegregation case), two speeches he gave while on the Supreme Court, an internal memorandum he wrote during the Court's deliberation in the Bakke affirmative action case, and his frustrated dissent in a 1991 death penalty case. The combination of Zelden's sure-footed text and these documents make this book a strong choice for a variety of undergraduate courses.

The book is structured chronologically. Zelden follows an opening chapter on Marshall's upbringing and education with five chapters charting his civil rights work with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from the 1930s through the early 1960s, a chapter on his time as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and then as Solicitor General, and a concluding chapter on his years on the United States Supreme Court (1967–1991). The book's focus is clearly more on Mr. Civil Rights (as Marshall was known during his time with the NAACP) than on Mr. Justice Marshall. Zelden dedicates an entire chapter to the litigation leading to Brown and another on the NAACP's efforts to implement the decision. He also includes an excellent chapter describing Marshall's skepticism toward the Civil Rights Movement's turn to direct-action protest in the post-Brown period.

Zelden's choice to dedicate only a single chapter to Marshall's almost quarter century on the nation's highest court makes sense. Marshall's accomplishments as a justice never came close to his accomplishments as a civil rights lawyer. On the Court, his most significant contributions were dissents. And in most cases, the Court has only moved further and further away from the kinds of arguments that Marshall was making in these dissents. Marshall often seemed detached from the work of the Court. Witnessing “the landmarks of his life's work—the social, political, economic, and constitutional changes that he had helped bring about at such great cost—being circumscribed, abandoned, or reversed” by his own colleagues, Zelden writes, made him “cantankerous and belligerent” (146). Marshall's time on the Supreme Court was neither his happiest nor his finest hour.

Zelden's clearly admires his subject. He often relies on Marshall's own words and the words of his admirers to describe and make sense of his life story. The Marshall that emerges from these pages is brave, skilled, principled, driven, and, at times, heroic. This is not to say that Zelden avoids Marshall's rougher edges. His famous sense of humor could be biting; his relationship with his first wife was distant; and he was not always up to speed with his work as a judge. Zelden, however, as the sympathetic biographer, tends to come to Marshall's rescue in the end. When, for example, Marshall's often-neglected first wife was in the final months of her life, stricken by cancer, Zelden notes that Marshall put aside his work and stayed by her side. And Zelden contends that Marshall's performance ultimately “proved his critics wrong” (132) when they questioned his qualifications and work ethic as a federal judge. Even the provocative opening line of the book—“Thurgood Marshall was an angry man”—is quickly softened by Zelden's explanation that this anger was tempered by Marshall's “faith in the law's power to fix what was broken and optimism that his faith in the law would win out in the end” (2). As with so much about this book, Zelden's attitude toward his subject is perfectly aligned with the admirable aim of the book: to introduce a new generation of Americans to the life and work of one of the most important, fascinating, and inspiring figures from our recent past.