I just finished Malcolm X's Autobiography. One of the rawest, most inspiring books I've read in my life. I affirm Malcolm X is one of history's most misunderstood characters, and encourage everyone to read it!
As for right now, For Whom The Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway.
It is an absolutely brilliant book, I read it after watching the movie, I wish I'd read it first as the movie is good but not perfect by any stretch.
I bought X's book because it was recommended by the NME (new music express) in the UK in one of their "right on" lists of literature for anyone starting uni, it was popular in the Virgin Megastores and HMV stores book sections, and I did not expect a lot, I'd read Bokowski (spelling) on their recommendation and thought it was rubbish but X's book I could not put down from the first couple of pages.
Its one of the few books that I thought was like a living thing. Its also got a great section, which has been cited a lot, I think even on a par with Anna Freud, in social services, child services literature.
He writes about how his already difficult circumstances where more or less broken by child services intervention and his terrible experience of the foster system, delinquency, criminal justice system is all laid out, I think it was only his good fortune that he actually was articulate and got involved in challenging oppression as he could have been on course to join the masses of anonymous statistics resulting from poorly executed family interventions.
I know he died in the course of his agitation, everyone dies, not everyone actually lives or leaves an impression on their times as he did. Also, for all his talk about the right to defence, the right to armed and violent self-defence at that, he was shot to death and was unarmed at the time, none of his supporters at that gathering were armed etc. Which I think is something to think about.