As pundit David Brooks once opined, the United States is a creedal nation: "Almost every significant movement in American history has been led by people calling upon us to live up to our creed."

Few public figures have grasped Brooks' insight as deeply as the activist whose legacy Mark Whitaker chronicles in his luminous, nuanced "The Afterlife of Malcolm X." In his telling, Malcolm not just talked the talk, he walked the walk — even as his trajectory looped in on itself.

Contrary to the peaceful resistance of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm advocated for a combative stance toward white "devils," but his racial beliefs shifted after his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1964.

Whitaker's book kicks off with a spellbinding account of the lead-up to Malcolm's assassination in Manhattan's Audubon Ballroom, the subsequent investigation and trial, and his preceding break with mentor Elijah Muhammad, the head of the Nation of Islam (NOI).

Malcolm was collaborating closely on an autobiography with journalist Alex Haley when he was killed, recreating his fraught Midwestern childhood, the murder of his father, a career as a petty crook and a prison stint that kindled a religious conversion. His posthumous book "would allow him to speak to millions in his wake, not in the fiery tone of the man himself but in the intimate, confessional voice on the printed page," Whitaker notes.

The author, a contributor to "CBS Sunday Morning," devotes the bulk of his narrative to the artists, athletes, scholars and politicians who inherited — in some cases transformed — Malcolm's cultural DNA. For six decades, Malcolm has been embraced across the ideological spectrum, from Leftist poets (Maya Angelou and Amiri Baraka) to moderate orators (Barack Obama) to right-wing judges (Clarence Thomas).

Whitaker leavens his chapters with piquant anecdotes. The Black Panther Party's famous crouching-panther logo originated in voter registration drives in the rural South, emblazoned on fliers designed to lure illiterate farmers. The cadre of Black Power radicals, such as Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton, and Eldridge Cleaver, sparred over their message.

As writer/editor Julius Lester observed, Malcolm "said aloud those things Negroes had been afraid to say to each other. His clear, uncomplicated words cut through the chains on black minds like a giant blowtorch. His words were not spoken for the benefit of the press."

In true American fashion, Whitaker evokes the commercial forces that have stretched the myth to fit virtually any agenda. Movie director Spike Lee was suspected of sanitizing Malcolm in his 1992 biopic; yet as Whitaker underscores, Lee was not preaching to the choir but rather to a mainstream audience, trading on his Hollywood connections.

"Whether Lee was simultaneously encouraging young people to view Malcolm as a commodity, however, became a topic of worried discussion," Whitaker writes. "By the time the film debuted, Lee had opened up two more boutiques in Los Angeles, in addition to his Brooklyn store, to sell X hats and other Malcolm memorabilia."

"The Afterlife of Malcolm X" is a sumptuous, essential book that draws us to the real man while acknowledging him as somehow unknowable, an American sphinx. (My only quibble: a whopping 113 repetitions of the verb "recalled.") Today, we face the same perils and prejudices Malcolm confronted; let us engage them with his feisty eloquence and moral resolve.

Hamilton Cain, who also reviews for the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post, lives in Brooklyn, New York.

The Afterlife of Malcolm X: An Outcast Turned Icon's Enduring Impact on America

By: Mark Whitaker.

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 448 pages.