A rather unsatisfying book. In a way, it is apparently not yet time for a definitive biography of Malcolm X. While the author got access to police and FBI files on him, and made some use of them, they remain redacted. Whether that will change we don't know, leaving the suspicion that they were somehow involved in events of his death. Yet the author died the very week the book was released--so we can hardly say that the publication of his culminating life's work was premature! The author makes a number of conjectures for which there is little evidence, or for which evidence is not clearly provided. And these conjectures are about significant issues--who bombed his house; who ordered, planned and carried out his murder; who he spent the night before his death with. One would like answers to questions like these in a seemingly definitive biography. The author was not able to answer them definitively, yet he was unwilling to leave them unanswered. So he gave answers...that felt unsatisfying. On a myriad of smaller issues the author provided new and excellent insights, so it is not as though there was no reason for this book. The author's accounts became so detailed that one sometimes felt the forest was being lost in all the trees. There was not really much of an overarching narrative--unless perhaps "reinvention" is itself a narrative. But it didn't feel like one. In the epilogue the author offers some narratives, but it was a bit late. Perhaps the book needed more time and thought to be turned into such a narrative--but, again, one can hardly complain since time is what the author did not have. So...I'm glad we have the book, but it remains an unsatisfying book.