Continuing the story that began in his widely praised Boston Boy, Nat Hentoff in Speaking Freely guides us through more than forty years of his life in journalism, a career as various as his passions, and follows our social history from the civil rights and antiwar movements to the most incendiary battles (such as abortion) of the present day.

Hentoff first evokes New York in the fifties, when he wrote for the jazz magazine Down Beat and came to know some of the most talented jazzmen of all time - Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, and Dizzy Gillespie, to name only a few. He looks back to his apprenticeship under George Seldes and I. F. Stone, two unyieldingly independent journalists whom he credits with charting his direction in the field.

And he recounts his associations with a wide array of Americans, from Malcolm X, who was a friend, to Louis Farrakhan, who has labeled Hentoff "the Antichrist"; from Adlai Stevenson to John Cardinal O'Connor; and from the "utterly singular" editor of The New Yorker, William Shawn, to uncelebrated heroes far afield from Manhattan and Washington.