This largely admiring but flawed analysis explores King, with his “extraordinary performances,” as chameleon, consummate showman, exalted Mosaic leader, treacly icon, postethnic man and crossover artist. Sociologist Rieder (Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism
) argues that King's powers of rhetoric allowed him to straddle and dissolve boundaries between black and white and draws patronizing distinctions between King's “black talk” and “white talk” (King “even went so far as to use the word 'ontological' in one homily”). Perhaps in an avoidance of academese, Rieder slips into the gossipy (“despite his cavorting, King did not stray with white women”) and the flippant (“Surely King's love of ribs and chitterlings was out of sync with the vegetarianism of the 'little brown man,' as King sometimes referred to Gandhi”). While acknowledging that the work of sociolinguist Dell Hymes “informs this entire book,” Rieder does not show how he uses Hymes's model. Rieder ends up with a commonplace argument—that King used different voices in talking to intimate friends and public audiences, in speaking as pastor and as political figure (“His oratory in the meetings was a means to ends... quite different from those at play in church contemplation or backstage talk with friends”). No news that. (Apr.)
