Trying to tell a richly detailed version of the turbulent and triumphant history of the civil rights movement in under 200 pages is a risky thing, but John A. Salmond, a professor of American history at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, has produced a text that speaks equally to the college student and educator. Citing the origins of the civil rights movement in President Franklin D. Roosevelt"s New Deal policies of the 1930s, Salmond highlights the sit-ins, political organizations, riots, and the often brutal response of the United States government. He chronicles both the well-known and anonymous players on the stage of Afro-American liberation, from the role of civil rights lawyers Charles H. Houston and future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in the historic Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education in Topeka, Kansas, that ended official segregation in America, to the act of defiance by Rosa Parks that led to the Montgomery bus boycott and brought Martin Luther King Jr. to prominence, as well as the assassinations of King and black nationalist leader Malcolm X. With clear prose refreshingly free of racial and social cliches, Salmond correctly states that, contrary to those who saw the civil rights movement as an agitation spurred on by outside forces, "the civil rights revolution had its roots deep in the American experience, in the egalitarian notions of Thomas Jefferson [and] the Emancipation Proclamation.... It is a mistake to think that Southern blacks meekly accepted the imposition of a caste system. They fought against it from the beginning." --Eugene Holley, Jr.