Book Review: The Autobiography of Malcom X

This story was filled with irony, and by this story i mean me actually reading and reviewing this book. I like irony, I am a sarcastic person myself. The fact that I initially picked this book off the shelf because Malcom X‘s picture on the cover looks like actor Denzel Washington makes me grin.
The real story at hand is of a brave man who walked in danger, for he had taken the suffering of a suppressed people, and made it a suffering of his own. A man who was unreservedly comitted to liberating the black man, who had been trained to conceal his real thoughts as a mere matter of survival. A man who took the matter of freeing the black man, rather than integrating him into a society that crushed him and then penelized him for not being able to stand up.
I like to devide Malcom X’s life into two major parts. His childhood troubles, jail and joining the Nation of Islam into the first part, and his travel to Makkah for Hajj into the second. Although, first part is threefold the second part in duration, my biased eyes and heart naturally leant towards the second.
After a troubled childhood, teenagehood of crime and jail, Malcom finally joined the Nation of Islam – which is not by any means related to true Islam. The X denotes freedom of the last name given to him by the white slave master of his grandfather, and every member of the nation was given that X. 
A seperation from the nation however, led Malcom to seek the real truth of Islam, and travel to Makkah, where he beautifully describes the signs of God in form of warmth and brotherhood of the Muslims, and the true colorblindness of Islam. Despite a comic note of trouble at the customs office of the Jeddah airport – even all the way back in 1964 -, his descriptions made me doubt my sense of appreciation of things we take for granted in this holy land. His amusement with everyone eating and drinking out of the same plates and cups, sitting on the same rug and sleeping in the same room, being of all colors and races in the context of America’s bold racism were like a page out of National Geographic as he wold describe. What he believed could not exist in America, existed in front of his bare eyes. He did not catch me more than when he articulated in one word that feeling I get when I first see the Ka’aba : Numbness. To this day, I haven’t read or heard a better description.
Finally, he caught my eye and my centers of logic with yet another wise quote, after seeing America’s race troubles, and sensing a sound solution in further study of true Islam, when he said: All Islam needs is a PR firm.
Malcom X was assasined in 1965 at the age of forty, which only carries you think about what he accomplished in a lifetime shorter than that given to most. One wonders what he could have done had God willed and lengthen his life. Truly, a man of the people.