French, a professor of journalism at Columbia and a former foreign correspondent for The New York Times, covers a lot of ground in a book that merges biography with panorama. His previous book, Born in Blackness, showed how the making of the modern world wasn't just a story about Europe; it was also about Africa. The Second Emancipation is a sequel, bringing that approach into the postwar era... The Second Emancipation ably treads the line on Nkrumah's complicated legacy. French keeps reminding the reader of the larger context, pointing out how European colonies were laboratories not for good governance but for authoritarianism.--Jennifer Szalai "New York Times"

Howard W. French thinks Nkrumah deserves better.... He calls Nkrumah 'comparable in his impact on the world of his era to Mandela, and even Gandhi.' He is especially attentive to the way Nkrumah was influenced by Black Americans, and how he influenced them in turn, by showing what Black political power might look like... [The Second Emancipation] re-creates the era of soaring hopes in Africa.--Kelefa Sanneh "New Yorker"

The Second Emancipation, as political and intellectual history, is profound and excellent.--Walton Muyumba "Boston Globe"

Nkrumah's odyssey is the subject of Howard W. French's riveting new book ...Nkrumah paralleled Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. in his reach and influence. That little is known about him outside of Africa and African diasporic communities is a reflection of the continued marginalization of the continent in the Western imagination... Against the backdrop of the US imposition of travel restrictions on disproportionately African countries, including Ghana, and an enduring proxy conflict in Sudan, French's book reads as history told in the present tense, at once enthralling and devastating. The Africa of Nkrumah's dreamworld--stable, prosperous, in charge of its own destiny--is still struggling to be born.--Vivien Chang "Los Angeles Review of Books"

A forward-looking approach.... [French] challenges lazy theories that attribute Africa's current economic precarity and political instability to incompetence and wonders what the continent might look like if today's intellectuals and organizers readopted Nkrumah's Pan-African ideal.--Lovia Gyarkye "New Republic"

An important work that deserves to be widely read.--Jonathan M. Jackson "History Today"

In its dramatic depiction of a continent that once exuded the promise of a newly won freedom, this book offers a generational work that positions not only Africa but also the American civil rights movement at the forefront of modern-day history.--Arab News, "What We Are Reading Today"

In this magisterial account, journalist French (Born in Blackness) revisits the history of the Pan-Africanist movement through the life of Ghanaian prime minister Kwame Nkrumah, who in 1957 became the first head of state of the first colonized African nation to gain independence . . . Weaving a staggering amount of history into a propulsive narrative that recasts the 20th century as a long struggle for liberation, this is a towering achievement.--Publishers Weekly, starred review

A fluent exploration of an important if often overlooked political leader whose ideas still bear consideration.-- "Kirkus Reviews"

French adeptly places the rise and fall of Kwame Nkrumah, first president of Ghana, the first liberated African colony, in the context of wider anti-colonial movements in Asia and the Middle East, as well as Nkrumah's influence on racial justice in the U.S...Despite assassination threats, ethnic rivalries, and failure to achieve his greatest goal of a pan African Federation, Nkrumah's influence on African and African American liberation remains unparalleled.--Lesley Williams "Booklist"

It would be as impossible to overstate the importance of Nkrumah as it would be to overstate the brilliance of this study. For too many, Africa as a whole remains an enigma. Howard W. French's masterwork clarifies the continent, both its history and the backstory to its current conflicts, with remarkable precision.--Greg Grandin, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The End of the Myth

A brilliant examination. . . . Howard W. French illuminates a period of time when people believed that standards of justice and equality could prevail for African people on the continent and in the diaspora, especially in the United States during the civil rights movement.--Annette Gordon-Reed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Hemingses of Monticello

An original, provocative, and important work of history. . . . With meticulous research and crisp writing, Howard W. French helps us see and understand the modern world anew. An extraordinary achievement.--Jonathan Eig, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for King: A Life

Kwame Nkrumah founded a country and became the leading African statesman of the twentieth century. French tells Nkrumah's story wonderfully well, in all its greatness and complexity.--Odd Arne Westad, Yale University, and author of The Cold War: A World History

In prose both lyrical and personal, Howard W. French reveals how civil rights and decolonization were bound together by Garvey's ghost, Du Boisian internationalism, a long dream of Black power, and a vision of pan-Africanism based less on returning home than on rejecting the world order and the color line that belts it. A tour de force.--Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

In this truly monumental biography of the rise and fall of Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, global observer Howard W. French documents the Cold War hubris that foredoomed Africa's aspirations in a Greek tragedy of racist pathologies affronted by emancipated leadership. French's The Second Emancipation stands the second half of the last century on its geopolitical head.--David Levering Lewis, winner of the Pulitzer Prize