I just finished March Book 3, and I felt I couldn't quite write a fitting review until I had completed the series. I liked this book a lot, and intend to read Book Two and Three. His obvious affection for these humble creatures and his determination to spread the Good News are both important parts of the man who is John Lewis. There is much important public history here to be savored and remembered, but I have to admit that my favorite part of this book is Lewis’ accounts of his first efforts to be a preacher by delivering sermons to an unlikely congregation: the family chickens. Very effective too are his scenes of crowds, protest, and violence, for Powell brings a vivid sense of movement and drama to the conflicts in the southern streets. They evoke the 60’s news films of the civil rights era, at times suggesting a noir-like menace, at other times a quiet melancholy. Nate Powell, the graphic artist and co-author, makes the excellent choice of stark black-and-white illustrations to tell John Lewis’ story. As it it shifts from its frame story-a gathering of Lewis with friends and constituents minutes before Obama’s first inauguration-to the tales Lewis relates of his early years, the book manages to convey both the heroism and charm of the man, his steadfastness, his shrewd strategic mind, and his loving, almost childlike simplicity. This first volume of the graphically realized three-part autobiography of civil rights stalwart John Lewis covers the congressman’s life from his days as a poor farm boy dreaming of becoming a preacher to his work as an organizer of the 1960 lunch counter sit-ins in Nashville and the founding of the Students’ Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.
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