Growing up king. . - Book Shelf - Growing Up King: An Intimate Memoir - book review

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination was a national tragedy, but for 7-year-old Dexter Scott King, it was a personal and historical tragedy that changed his life forever. In Growing Up King: An Intimate Memoir with Ralph Wiley (Warner Books Hardcover, $24.95), King writes candidly about the lingering effects of growing up without his father and living with the weight of "the King legacy." For years after the assassin's bullet took his father's life, King says he was haunted by a memory of himself and his dad riding their bikes through Atlanta's streets and by his father's full-throated laugh as he romped with him and his brother and sisters. King, who currently serves as chairman, CEO and president of the King Center for Non Violent Social Change, later ruffled feathers with some of his leadership decisions. In this book he answers his critics and talks frankly about the difficulties in maintaining romantic relationships when you are the son of Martin Luther King Jr. (see story that begins on page 122).