After graduating, Howell Raines went to work as a cub reporter for the Birmingham Post- Herald. Living in Birmingham and becoming a reporter, are the factors that helped educate him about race and created his yearning fascination with the Civil Rights Movement. Years later Raines took the risky gamble of quitting his job to begin working on this novel. My Soul Is Rested is a novel consisted of numerous personal recollections regarding the civil rights movement. From the Student Sit-Ins in 1960, to the Selma March led by Dr. King, there are many people who contributed to this significant movement. A few include Rosa Parks, E.D Nixon, John Lewis, Ed Garner and many other blacks and whites who participated in Sit-Ins, different campaigns, integration…show more content… I was never too familiar with the freedom riders and I now have a better understanding of the determination that participants of the Civil Rights Movement had. The strengths of the book is that it provided numerous interviews and exclusive information, providing support to the facts regarding the Civil Rights Movement that have already been shared For example, the account form Lawrence Guyot regarding the summer project. I felt grief as I read about his personal experience as multiple bodies remained unfound, but claimed to have been found in newspaper reports. Minor facts included in this novel make the story more alive, and the supporting reference to different events truly opened my eyes to this historical event .A weakness in the story is the actual usefulness of each interview. Many are revealing and informative, while some are not as put together and at time became repetitious. The story ended with Ralph David Abernathy’s account regarding Martin Luther King, Jr’s death. Ralph provides a detailed story about the tragic accident from the time the shot first took place to the last moment when he went to identify his body after he was announced dead. I truly feel that the story did end properly because it symbolized the end of the Civil Rights Movement. There’s not much that I would do to improve this story, other than to maybe remove some of the repetitive interviews such as that with John Lewis. Overall I truly enjoyed this book because it taught me things that I was not able to learn through a regular history textbook, such as the simple fact that Wendell Hoffman was the first cameraman that ever came to Selma. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone wanting to learn more regarding the Civil Rights Movement and black