THE DREAM: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Speech That Inspired a Nation

Hansen wasn't yet born on August 28, 1963, when Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his momentous "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, at the first mass march on Washington of the modern Civil Rights movement. Decades later, Hansen studied the Civil Rights movement and the Constitution at Yale law school and found he kept coming back to King's speech, continually impressed by how large its message looms in 20th-century American history. King's words, Hansen claims, proved to be a keystone for understanding the social and political upheaval of those times: "He gave the nation a vocabulary to express what was happening." Hansen begins this debut by recounting the weeks leading up to the march – the strain in the streets, the apprehension of authorities and the mood of King and his inner circle. King, who delivered sermons and speeches almost daily, knew that this would be the biggest address of his career, and he prepared carefully. For inspiration he read the Bible, the Gettysburg Address and the Declaration of Independence (the speech alludes to all three). The core of the book is Hansen's studious line-by-line analysis of the speech itself—King's choice of words and phrases, his intonation, his allusions, his targets. In the end, Hansen maintains, the speech is timeless because it goes right to the core of democratic principles, and as such can be held up as inspiration for the disenfranchised across cultures. Try as he might to employ a loose, personal narrative, The Dream sometimes reads a bit didactically, but it is serious, scholarly and engaged, a fitting contribution to the 40th anniversary of the speech and the march. (July 11)