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Between the World and Me Hardcover – July 14, 2015
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Hailed by Toni Morrison as “required reading,” a bold and personal literary exploration of America’s racial history by “the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race” (Rolling Stone)
NAMED ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY • NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL BOOKS OF THE DECADE BY CNN • NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE
ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, O: The Oprah Magazine, The Washington Post, People, Entertainment Weekly, Vogue, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, New York, Newsday, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly
In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden?
Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.
- Print length176 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherOne World
- Publication dateJuly 14, 2015
- Dimensions5 x 0.74 x 7.5 inches
- ISBN-100812993543
- ISBN-13978-0812993547
- Lexile measure1090L
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From the Publisher
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Between the World and Me, a finalist for the National Book Award. A MacArthur “Genius Grant” fellow, Coates has received the National Magazine Award, the Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism, and the George Polk Award for his Atlantic cover story “The Case for Reparations.” He lives in New York with his wife and son.
THE WATER DANCER | WE WERE EIGHT YEARS IN POWER | THE BEAUTIFUL STRUGGLE | THE BEAUTIFU STRUGGLE (Adapted for Young Adults) | |
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A boldly conjured debut novel about a magical gift, a devastating loss, and an underground war for freedom | A vital account of modern America, from one of the definitive voices of this historic moment; this collection includes the landmark essay “The Case for Reparations.” | An exceptional father-son story from the about the reality that tests us, the myths that sustain us, and the love that saves us | Adapted from the adult memoir, this father-son story explores how boys become men, and quite specifically, how Ta-Nehisi Coates became Ta-Nehisi Coates |
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of July 2015: Readers of his work in The Atlantic and elsewhere know Ta-Nehisi Coates for his thoughtful and influential writing on race in America. Written as a series of letters to his teenaged son, his new memoir, Between the World and Me, walks us through the course of his life, from the tough neighborhoods of Baltimore in his youth, to Howard University—which Coates dubs “The Mecca” for its revelatory community of black students and teachers—to the broader Meccas of New York and Paris. Coates describes his observations and the evolution of his thinking on race, from Malcolm X to his conclusion that race itself is a fabrication, elemental to the concept of American (white) exceptionalism. Ferguson, Trayvon Martin, and South Carolina are not bumps on the road of progress and harmony, but the results of a systemized, ubiquitous threat to “black bodies” in the form of slavery, police brutality, and mass incarceration. Coates is direct and, as usual, uncommonly insightful and original. There are no wasted words. This is a powerful and exceptional book.--Jon Foro
From School Library Journal
Review
“Powerful and passionate . . . profoundly moving . . . a searing meditation on what it means to be black in America today.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Really powerful and emotional.”—John Legend, The Wall Street Journal
“Extraordinary . . . [Coates] writes an impassioned letter to his teenage son—a letter both loving and full of a parent’s dread—counseling him on the history of American violence against the black body, the young African-American’s extreme vulnerability to wrongful arrest, police violence, and disproportionate incarceration.”—David Remnick, The New Yorker
“Brilliant . . . a riveting meditation on the state of race in America . . . [Coates] is firing on all cylinders, and it is something to behold: a mature writer entirely consumed by a momentous subject and working at the extreme of his considerable powers at the very moment national events most conform to his vision.”—The Washington Post
“An eloquent blend of history, reportage, and memoir written in the tradition of James Baldwin with echoes of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man . . . It is less a typical memoir of a particular time and place than an autobiography of the black body in America. . . . Coates writes with tenderness, especially of his wife, child, and extended family, and with frankness. . . . Coates’s success, in this book and elsewhere, is due to his lucidity and innate dignity, his respect for himself and for others. He refuses to preach or talk down to white readers or to plead for acceptance: He never wonders why we just can’t all get along. He knows government policies make getting along near impossible.”—The Boston Globe
“For someone who proudly calls himself an atheist, Coates gives us a whole lot of ‘Can I get an amen?’ in this slim and essential volume of familial joy and rigorous struggle. . . . [He] has become the most sought-after public intellectual on the issue of race in America, with good reason. Between the World and Me . . . is at once a magnification and a distillation of our existence as black people in a country we were not meant to survive. It is a straight tribute to our strength, endurance and grace. . . . [Coates] speaks resolutely and vividly to all of black America.”—Los Angeles Times
“A crucial book during this moment of generational awakening.”—The New Yorker
“A work that’s both titanic and timely, Between the World and Me is the latest essential reading in America’s social canon.”—Entertainment Weekly
“Coates delivers a beautiful lyrical call for consciousness in the face of racial discrimination in America. . . . Between the World and Me is in the same mode of The Fire Next Time; it is a book designed to wake you up. . . . An exhortation against blindness.”—The Guardian
“Coates has crafted a deeply moving and poignant letter to his own son. . . . [His] book is a compelling mix of history, analysis and memoir. Between the World and Me is a much-needed artifact to document the times we are living in [from] one of the leading public intellectuals of our generation. . . . The experience of having a sage elder speak directly to you in such lyrical, gorgeous prose—language bursting with the revelatory thought and love of black life—is a beautiful thing.”—The Root
“Rife with love, sadness, anger and struggle, Between the World and Me charts a path through the American gauntlet for both the black child who will inevitably walk the world alone and for the black parent who must let that child walk away.”—Newsday
“Poignant, revelatory and exceedingly wise, Between the World and Me is an essential clarion call to our collective conscience. We ignore it at our own peril.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Masterfully written . . . powerful storytelling.”—New York Post
“One of the most riveting and heartfelt books to appear in some time . . . The book achieves a level of clarity and eloquence reminiscent of Ralph Ellison’s classic Invisible Man. . . . The perspective [Coates] brings to American life is one that no responsible citizen or serious scholar can safely ignore.”—Foreign Affairs
“Urgent, lyrical, and devastating in its precision, Coates has penned a new classic of our time.”—Vogue
“Powerful.”—The Economist
“A work of rare beauty and revelatory honesty . . . Between the World and Me is a love letter written in a moral emergency, one that Coates exposes with the precision of an autopsy and the force of an exorcism. . . . Coates is frequently lauded as one of America’s most important writers on the subject of race today, but this in fact undersells him: Coates is one of America’s most important writers on the subject of America today. . . . [He’s] a polymath whose breadth of knowledge on matters ranging from literature to pop culture to French philosophy to the Civil War bleeds through every page of his book, distilled into profound moments of discovery, immensely erudite but never showy.”—Slate
“The most important book I’ve read in years . . . an illuminating, edifying, educational, inspiring experience.”—Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center
“It’s an indescribably enlightening, enraging, important document about being black in America today. Coates is perhaps the best we have, and this book is perhaps the best he’s ever been.”—Deadspin
“Vital reading at this moment in America.”—U.S. News & World Report
“[Coates] has crafted a highly provocative, thoughtfully presented, and beautifully written narrative. . . . Much of what Coates writes may be difficult for a majority of Americans to process, but that’s the incisive wisdom of it. Read it, think about it, take a deep breath and read it again. The spirit of James Baldwin lives within its pages.”—The Christian Science Monitor
“Part memoir, part diary, and wholly necessary, it is precisely the document this country needs right now.”—New Republic
“A moving testament to what it means to be black and an American in our troubled age . . . Between the World and Me feels of-the-moment, but like James Baldwin’s celebrated 1963 treatise The Fire Next Time, it stands to become a classic on the subject of race in America.”—The Seattle Times
“Riveting . . . Coates delivers a fiery soliloquy dissecting the tradition of the erasure of African-Americans beginning with the deeply personal.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“[Between the World and Me] is not a Pollyanna, coming-of-age memoir about how idyllic life was growing up in America. It is raw. It is searing. . . . [It’s] a book that should be read and shared by everyone, as it is a story that painfully and honestly explores the age-old question of what it means to grow up black and male in America.”—The Baltimore Sun
“A searing indictment of America’s legacy of violence, institutional and otherwise, against blacks.”—Chicago Tribune
“I know that this book is addressed to the author’s son, and by obvious analogy to all boys and young men of color as they pass, inexorably, into harm’s way. I hope that I will be forgiven, then, for feeling that Ta-Nehisi Coates was speaking to me, too, one father to another, teaching me that real courage is the courage to be vulnerable, to admit having fallen short of the mark, to stay open-hearted and curious in the face of hate and lies, to remain skeptical when there is so much comfort in easy belief, to acknowledge the limits of our power to protect our children from harm and, hardest of all, to see how the burden of our need to protect becomes a burden on them, one that we must, sooner or later, have the wisdom and the awful courage to surrender.”—Michael Chabon
“Ta-Nehisi Coates is the James Baldwin of our era, and this is his cri de coeur. A brilliant thinker at the top of his powers, he has distilled four hundred years of history and his own anguish and wisdom into a prayer for his beloved son and an invocation to the conscience of his country. Between the World and Me is an instant classic and a gift to us all.”—Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
. . . we sprawl in gray chains in a place full of winters when what we want is the sun
Amira Baraka, “Ka Ba”
Son,
Last Sunday the host of a popular news show asked me what it meant to lose my body. The host was broadcasting from Washington, D.C., and I was seated in a remote studio on the far west side of Manhattan. A satellite closed the miles between us, but no machinery could close the gap between her world and the world for which I had been summoned to speak. When the host asked me about my body, her face faded from the screen, and was replaced by a scroll of words, written by me earlier that week.
The host read these words for the audience, and when she finished she turned to the subject of my body, although she did not mention it specifically. But by now I am accustomed to intelligent people asking about the condition of my body without realizing the nature of their request. Specifically, the host wished to know why I felt that white America’s progress, or rather the progress of those Americans who believe that they are white, was built on looting and violence. Hearing this, I felt an old and indistinct sadness well up in me. The answer to this question is the record of the believers themselves. The answer is American history.
There is nothing extreme in this statement. Americans deify democracy in a way that allows for a dim awareness that they have, from time to time, stood in defiance of their God. But democracy is a forgiving God and America’s heresies—torture, theft, enslavement—are so common among individuals and nations that none can declare themselves immune. In fact, Americans, in a real sense, have never betrayed their God. When Abraham Lincoln declared, in 1863, that the battle of Gettysburg must ensure “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” he was not merely being aspirational; at the onset of the Civil War, the United States of America had one of the highest rates of suffrage in the world. The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant “government of the people” but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term “people” to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me. Thus America’s problem is not its betrayal of “government of the people,” but the means by which “the people” acquired their names.
This leads us to another equally important ideal, one that Americans implicitly accept but to which they make no conscious claim. Americans believe in the reality of “race” as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world. Racism—the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them—inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In this way, racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or the Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, a tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as beyond the handiwork of men.
But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming “the people” has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible—this is the new idea at the heart of this new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.
These new people are, like us, a modern invention. But unlike us, their new name has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power. The new people were something else before they were white—Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish—and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again. Perhaps they will truly become American and create a nobler basis for their myths. I cannot call it. As for now, it must be said that the process of washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the belief in being white, was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies.
The new people are not original in this. Perhaps there has been, at some point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to discover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal. America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and the terrorists, despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization. One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen’s claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard. This is difficult because there exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much. And it is so easy to look away, to live with the fruits of our history and to ignore the great evil done in all of our names. But you and I have never truly had that luxury. I think you know.
I write you in your fifteenth year. I am writing you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, that John Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department store. And you have seen men in uniform drive by and murder Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old child whom they were oath-bound to protect. And you have seen men in the same uniforms pummel Marlene Pinnock, someone’s grandmother, on the side of a road. And you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy. Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed. Resent the people trying to entrap your body and it can be destroyed. Turn into a dark stairwell and your body can be destroyed. The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations. All of this is common to black people. And all of this is old for black people. No one is held responsible.
There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.
That Sunday, with that host, on that news show, I tried to explain this as best I could within the time allotted. But at the end of the segment, the host flashed a widely shared picture of an eleven-year-old black boy tearfully hugging a white police officer. Then she asked me about “hope.” And I knew then that I had failed. And I remembered that I had expected to fail. And I wondered again at the indistinct sadness welling up in me. Why exactly was I sad? I came out of the studio and walked for a while. It was a calm December day. Families, believing themselves white, were out on the streets. Infants, raised to be white, were bundled in strollers. And I was sad for these people, much as I was sad for the host and sad for all the people out there watching and reveling in a specious hope. I realized then why I was sad. When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream. I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is treehouses and the Cub Scouts. The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies. And knowing this, knowing that the Dream persists by warring with the known world, I was sad for the host, I was sad for all those families, I was sad for my country, but above all, in that moment, I was sad for you.
That was the week you learned that the killers of Michael Brown would go free. The men who had left his body in the street like some awesome declaration of their inviolable power would never be punished. It was not my expectation that anyone would ever be punished. But you were young and still believed. You stayed up till 11 p.m. that night, waiting for the announcement of an indictment, and when instead it was announced that there was none you said, “I’ve got to go,” and you went into your room, and I heard you crying. I came in five minutes after, and I didn’t hug you, and I didn’t comfort you, because I thought it would be wrong to comfort you. I did not tell you that it would be okay, because I have never believed it would be okay. What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it. I tell you now that the question of how one should live within a black body, within a country lost in the Dream, is the question of my life, and the pursuit of this question, I have found, ultimately answers itself.
This must seem strange to you. We live in a “goal-oriented” era. Our media vocabulary is full of hot takes, big ideas, and grand theories of everything. But some time ago I rejected magic in all its forms. This rejection was a gift from your grandparents, who never tried to console me with ideas of an afterlife and were skeptical of preordained American glory. In accepting both the chaos of history and the fact of my total end, I was freed to truly consider how I wished to live—specifically, how do I live free in this black body? It is a profound question because America understands itself as God’s handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men. I have asked the question through my reading and writings, through the music of my youth, through arguments with your grandfather, with your mother, your aunt Janai, your uncle Ben. I have searched for answers in nationalist myth, in classrooms, out on the streets, and on other continents. The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and girded me against the sheer terror of disembodiment.
And I am afraid. I feel the fear most acutely whenever you leave me. But I was afraid long before you, and in this I was unoriginal. When I was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid. I had seen this fear all my young life, though I had not always recognized it as such.
It was always right in front of me. The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my neighborhood, in their large rings and medallions, their big puffy coats and full-length fur-collared leathers, which was their armor against their world. They would stand on the corner of Gwynn Oak and Liberty, or Cold Spring and Park Heights, or outside Mondawmin Mall, with their hands dipped in Russell sweats. I think back on those boys now and all I see is fear, and all I see is them girding themselves against the ghosts of the bad old days when the Mississippi mob gathered ’round their grandfathers so that the branches of the black body might be torched, then cut away. The fear lived on in their practiced bop, their slouching denim, their big T‑shirts, the calculated angle of their baseball caps, a catalog of behaviors and garments enlisted to inspire the belief that these boys were in firm possession of everything they desired.
I saw it in their customs of war. I was no older than five, sitting out on the front steps of my home on Woodbrook Avenue, watching two shirtless boys circle each other close and buck shoulders. From then on, I knew that there was a ritual to a street fight, bylaws and codes that, in their very need, attested to all the vulnerability of the black teenage bodies.
I heard the fear in the first music I ever knew, the music that pumped from boom boxes full of grand boast and bluster. The boys who stood out on Garrison and Liberty up on Park Heights loved this music because it told them, against all evidence and odds, that they were masters of their own lives, their own streets, and their own bodies. I saw it in the girls, in their loud laughter, in their gilded bamboo earrings that announced their names thrice over. And I saw it in their brutal language and hard gaze, how they would cut you with their eyes and destroy you with their words for the sin of playing too much. “Keep my name out your mouth,” they would say. I would watch them after school, how they squared off like boxers, vaselined up, earrings off, Reeboks on, and leaped at each other.
Product details
- Publisher : One World; 1st edition (July 14, 2015)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 176 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0812993543
- ISBN-13 : 978-0812993547
- Lexile measure : 1090L
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 5 x 0.74 x 7.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #4,802 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4 in Discrimination & Racism
- #106 in Memoirs (Books)
- #280 in Literary Fiction (Books)
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About the author
Ta-Nehisi Coates is an award-winning author and journalist. His books include The Water Dancer and The Message. He is currently a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and the Sterling Brown Endowed Chair in the English department at Howard University.
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Customers find the book easy to read and engaging. They praise the writing quality as brilliant, eloquent, and fantastic. The story is described as profoundly insightful, heartfelt, and personal. Readers appreciate the author's honesty and intellectual honesty. Some find the story uncomfortable and painful to read at times. Overall, customers describe the book as moving and thought-provoking.
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Customers find the book engaging and well-written. They describe it as a stirring, brilliant read with an immediacy and urgency. The book is described as a quick but important read that is worth sitting down and enjoying without distractions.
"...His eulogy for Jones is haunting and beautiful. Accountability? There never is any. “..." Read more
"...Secondly, Coates is incredibly honest; there’s a “calling it like I see it” quality here that is refreshing...." Read more
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"...His is a staccato writing style; the “takeaways” of a 1000 page book...." Read more
"...The rhetoric is powerful and the argument informed. The writing is beautiful and the intent quite loving...." Read more
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"...them, Coates provides a remarkable first step with this compelling, poetic, and sometimes heartbreaking expressionistic book...." Read more
Customers find the book insightful and enlightening. They say it provides powerful first-hand information that explains much of what people raised in white societies experience. The book is described as eye-opening, important, and full of nuance and complexities.
"...Still, overall, a very important work, for America today, and for those still singing those “old union hymns.” 5-stars." Read more
"...The rhetoric is powerful and the argument informed. The writing is beautiful and the intent quite loving...." Read more
"...This is at once a beautiful, touching, moving and profoundly insightful book...." Read more
"...This is undoubtedly one of the most important books of the last 50 years. If I could gift a copy to every single American, I would." Read more
Customers find the story heartfelt and poignant. They appreciate the author's ability to combine deep emotion with an analytical mind. The book is described as a personal narrative that is intensely personal and reflective. The writing style is passionate, poetic, and sometimes heartbreaking. The author's intent is loving and the experience is uplifting.
"...The writing is beautiful and the intent quite loving. It is hard to do better for one's child--but tragic it needs to be written...." Read more
"...First, there are some incredibly tender, moving moments in Coates’ addresses to his son...." Read more
"...first step with this compelling, poetic, and sometimes heartbreaking expressionistic book...." Read more
"...The writing truly took my breath away. It was lyrical. It made me feel. It was a gut punch. It hurt...." Read more
Customers find the book honest, personal, and truthful. They appreciate the author's intellectual honesty and courage. The book is described as an incredible work of truth and pain, convincing and unbiased.
"...This book is written, earnestly and sincerely, as a letter to his son. There is no artifice in this...." Read more
"...Between the World and Me was beautiful, real, and raw. The writing truly took my breath away. It was lyrical. It made me feel. It was a gut punch...." Read more
"...His story is honest and visceral and convicting and horrifying and encouraging...." Read more
"...One is that race is the child of racism, not the father. So true, so simple, so profound, and so completely opposite of what our culture teaches us..." Read more
Customers find the story painful and heartbreaking. They describe the writing as raw and honest, making it difficult to read and understand.
"...Scathing, as good as Baldwin ever wrote...." Read more
"...His story is honest and visceral and convicting and horrifying and encouraging...." Read more
"...It made me uncomfortable; It made me think; It made me emotional; But never a full connection because I don’t think I’m the intended reader...." Read more
"...The book made me uncomfortable...but it's the right kind of uncomfortable...." Read more
Customers find the book's pacing engaging. They describe it as an important and moving read that draws them into the world with its words. The author brings the human element to the fore, and makes his points vividly.
"...First, there are some incredibly tender, moving moments in Coates’ addresses to his son...." Read more
"...This is at once a beautiful, touching, moving and profoundly insightful book...." Read more
"...He was smart, personable and kind-hearted. His mother, Mable Jones, had followed the “Dream”...." Read more
""Between the World and Me" is one of the most moving and beautifully written books I've ever read...." Read more
Customers have different views on the book's difficulty to follow. Some find it clear and easy to understand, while others find it difficult to read and understand fully. The premise is simple, but some readers found the first third of the book very challenging to read through and understand.
"...One is that race is the child of racism, not the father. So true, so simple, so profound, and so completely opposite of what our culture teaches us..." Read more
"...This book is hard. It left me shaken at times...." Read more
"...I found her book easy to connect with and approachable. While she constantly referred to Coates in her book and it made me excited to read his book...." Read more
"...Sometimes I felt that although it was short it was hard to keep reading at times, maybe because it felt heavy but it’s nothing compared to the..." Read more
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Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on August 8, 2016Way back at the beginning of time, that is, the 1960’s, Richard Wright and James Baldwin were obligatory reading for me, and I have read much of their work. I still recall a black woman in Atlanta damning me with faint praise: “I think you are a moderate liberal.” Likewise, the lyrics of an old Phil Ochs song, “Love me, I am a liberal” have rolled around in my head: “…and I knew all the old union hymns.” Nowadays, I suppose, Wright and Baldwin ARE “the old union hymns.” America has made so much progress in race relations since the “Amos and Andy Show” was the only authorized black presence on TV, and Jackie Robinson proved that a black man could play in professional sports. Some blacks are now “truffled” in my neighborhood. There is a Black Caucus in Congress, and then there is the matter of the President… Progress.
But there is also the stagnation, and backlash. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book concerns the latter. His first name is derived from an old Egyptian word for Nubia, the area to the south of them that was inhabited by blacks. The New York Times review of this book underscored the similarities, and delineated the differences between this work and Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. Both take the structure of an older black man telling a much younger black man the (racial) “facts of life” in America. In Baldwin’s case, it was to his nephew, in Coates, it is to his son.
Coates grew up “on the wrong side of the tracks” in Baltimore. At least, that is what it was called in Baldwin’s time. Perhaps it still is. A tough neighborhood. A war zone, literal, and of sorts. A lot of psychic energy is spent just trying to stay alive… of watching for what is out of place on the “trail” to school, and does that bring danger? Coats quantifies this, in terms of brain time, at 33%. Cuts down on your time for writing the next “killer app.” Another quantification: “At the onset of the Civil War, our stolen bodies were worth four billion dollars, more than all of American industry, all of American railroads, workshops, and factories combine, and the prime product rendered by our stolen bodies – cotton – was America’s prime export. The richest men in America lived in the Mississippi River Valley, and they made their riches off our stolen bodies.” He provides no basis for the four billion figure… and for those who would dispute it, is it double or half? I recently read and reviewed Ghosts Along The Mississippi: The Magic of the Old Houses of Louisiana, New Revised Edition, with the subtitle that includes “magic”. There was nothing magically about it. Far more than an abstract four billion, those “ghosts” of old mansions quantify what was stolen.
His is a staccato writing style; the “takeaways” of a 1000 page book. Concerning schools, quotes worthy of Paul Goodman: “I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance…Schools did not reveal truths, they concealed them.” He questions the meek acceptance and embrace of the “tear gas” of passive resistance. He admires Malcom X. Coates names 10-15 black men who have been killed by the police, the police that he says are so instrumental in fulfilling America’s will on race relations. Coates went to the black “Mecca,” Howard University, in Washington, DC, and was dazzled by the variety that is encompassed by that word: “blackness.” He finds love on more than one occasion.
Prince Jones, a fellow classmate of his at Howard was murdered by the police. He described this killing in detail, and has a heart-breaking visit to his mother, a medical doctor, who had worked her way up from scrubbing white people’s floors in Louisiana. His eulogy for Jones is haunting and beautiful. Accountability? There never is any. “And no one would be brought to account for this destruction, because my death would not be the fault of any human but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of ‘race,’ imposed upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgment of invisible gods. The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. They typhoon will not bend under indictment. They sent the killer of Prince Jones back to his work, because he was not a killer at all. He was a force on nature, the helpless agent of our world’s physical laws.” Scathing, as good as Baldwin ever wrote.
Coates seminal work is an update on the much “progress” that has NOT been made. Normally I would give it my special rating for an exceptional work, 6-stars. However, I did have some problems with it. He goes to France, his first trip abroad, and is enthralled… I’ve been there… figuring the 6eme arrondissement is the “center of the universe.” However, he never mentions an essential word for understanding France, “les banlieues,” literally, the suburbs, with such a different connotation than in America. A fellow reviewer has mentioned that he has become more critical after his first visit. And then I would also be critical of his use of the term “Dreamer,” of which there are many, for sure, but are not a monolithic block that seems to mean “non-black.” And he never develops the implications of the fact that the cop who killed Prince Jones was black also. Like “les banlieues,” “Tom,” of an avuncular nature, does not appear in his work either. Still, overall, a very important work, for America today, and for those still singing those “old union hymns.” 5-stars.
- Reviewed in the United States on July 19, 2015When I first heard about Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between The World and Me I criticized it (and the author) to a friend wondering what kind of father writes a book to a teenage son (the rhetorical answer being a bad one) admonishing their child to never believe in the aspirational narrative of the American Dream. "Read the book" I was told. Now that I have, I see my criticism as unfair and offensive. The rhetoric is powerful and the argument informed. The writing is beautiful and the intent quite loving. It is hard to do better for one's child--but tragic it needs to be written.
Not since William Rhoden's Forty Million Dollar Slaves has their been a book about race quite so provocative and harsh in its condemnation of those who buy into the American Dream. The two authors approach it from different angles, I think perhaps for generational reasons but I really can't know. To Rhoden the Michael Jordan's of the world were sell-outs bartering their dignity and souls for a modern version of slavery. To Coates Dreamers are deceived or deluded: nobody at the bottom (and all blacks are 'bottom') is ever precious to those who call themselves white. At best they are props or exceptions that prove the rule that all blacks are fuel or fodder; grist in the mill that keeps the Dreamer atop our social heap. If their bodies can no longer be legally enslaved, black bodies--usually teenage sons-- are with relentless regularity "broken" by whites or those who serve them. The American Dream for black citizens is a dystopia.
Coates uses the tradition of the slave narrative (Frederick Douglass' and Solomon Northrup's come immediately to mind) to tell a powerful story of an individual's physical, intellectual and emotional journey as a black man in America. From Western Baltimore to Howard University, NYC, and Paris Coates struggles to give discover an identity, then to debunk it, and then to refashion (quite brilliantly I thought) not as a series of truths but as a series of questions that are inherently mistrustful of Truth (particularly with a capital T). He most emphatically will not let Dreamers or those black believers in the Dream off the hook--and blame the black victims of violence. Trayvon Martin, Prince Jones, Michael Brown, Eric Garner et al., did nothing to deserve their deaths, and their deaths were not unfortunate: they were murdered.
A handful of quotes:
--60 percent of all young black men who drop out of high school will go to jail. This should disgrace the country. But does not...
--'Bodies were broken. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried our best.' "Good intention" is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.
--the Dream is just and noble, and real, and you are crazy for seeing the corruption and smelling the sulphur. For their innocence they nullify youranger....and you find yourself inveighing against yourself.
--and the Dreamers are quoting Martin Luther King and exulting nonviolence for the weak and the biggest guns for the strong.
Upon finishing The World And Me I found myself almost reflexively dismissing or beginning the process of refutation that would exonerate me or be mitigating factors. And then I stopped. I decided to just sit with Ta-Nehisi Coates' ideas and opinions for a while. To think about them. A few hours. A few days. I'm not sure how long. To let them percolate awhile and to simmer. I hope many many others will too.
Top reviews from other countries
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Kinky KidReviewed in Mexico on December 30, 2021
5.0 out of 5 stars Hermoso. triste y lleno de rabia, una lectura obligatoria
Doloroso y triste, pero al mismo tiempo hermoso, en esta carta hacia su propio hijo, Coates analiza la situación racial de Estados Unidos desde un enfoque muy personal. El libro escrito de manera magistral te hace sentir la rabia sobre las injusticias vividas por los afroamericanos solo por el color de la piel. Recomendadisima.
- liviarReviewed in Italy on February 25, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars A must-read if you're interested in current (and historical) Afro-American issurs
I admit I have read very little so far, concerning the issues people of color are facing worldwide and in the US specifically. This is not fiction, yet quite gripping. It's a good starting pointo to dicover a whole new world of emotions. I'll recommend this to anyone interested in understanding.
- Aline de Almeida GandraReviewed in Brazil on July 20, 2020
5.0 out of 5 stars Incredible book
I loved it. It changed my life.
I also wrote about this book for my Postcolonial Literature course at the University, and it was a great pleasure to analyze it as an academic person.
Great book!
- Warda (i.reads)Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 9, 2018
5.0 out of 5 stars I'm blown away.
Let me start off by saying that Toni Morrison has said, this book is required reading. So get yourself a copy! It's necessary reading for the current climate that we are in that is only portraying a single, skewed narrative and on the same side of that coin damaging and manipulating a narrative that needs to be heard.
As you may know, this book speaks about race in America, starting from the days of slavery till now, to provide us with this viewpoint that makes the reader understand ‘what it is like to inhabit a black body.’
It's almost like a personal diary from Coates to his son explaining how it is we have come to the state we are in, and to offer consolation to his son through it.
This is such a beautifully written book. I love that the author was able to write with such clarity that enabled the reader to really be put in a black person's shoes. To understand their culture and to comprehend that the root cause of it all is fear that is driving these people forward as it is their only means of survival. Terrifying fear where your guard is up 24/8 because you know that as soon as you step out into that world you have a target, set and ready, on your back, which translates to a harshness and power within an individual that is at its essence, fear. And Coates lets the reader (and his son) view this fear through his eyes, his upbringing and experiences and understanding of the world.
I was just on the constant verge of tears, whether it was out of anger or sadness, because what else are you meant to feel when you know that a specific group of people are completely broken down due to the colour of their skin? Yet, he speaks on understanding the 'white’ mentality. This book is full of empathy, it seeps out of every word, every sentence that is constructed
He speaks on identity, the social construct of races, the all American Dream that is a facade and build on the back of slavery, police brutality and the concept of whiteness.
It's not all doom and gloom. There is hope, there has to be and he shares beautiful moments in his life where barriers within himself are broken and clarity poured in, that the world is much more than America and its toxic narrative/lifestyle and the simple wonders of life that we take for granted.
I know that this is a book that I'll casually flick through every now again. I've filled it with my thoughts, which I'll probably have to add to as my perspective of this world changes and my own understanding grows. It was truly an an eye-opening read. I feel invigorated and my mind is more curious, hungry and eager to find out more.
4 people found this helpfulReport - Strategies to Sales (3S)Reviewed in Spain on June 4, 2017
5.0 out of 5 stars A Piece of Art
The author writes a letter to his son in order to show how his social environment, education and family background have influenced him, how all this history and memory around have shaped his personality and character, how it is to grown up in America being part of social minority.
Coates describes the fear, the discrimination, the prejudgment because of belonging to a minority (Afro-American) in the US. He writes also about how unfair the rule “you have to be twice as good” is, because this rule is a justification of the way things are and make people think it is their own fault, they are guilty in some way.
But these thoughts could be applied to any western society or any social group; the quote people who think they are white” is not only a reference to a book american classic, it is also a reference about how much we guilt ourselves for not getting what we fight for. We may believe many times it is our own fault, we may think maybe if we do it better next time we will get there, maybe the future will be different for us if we improve, maybe our children will get there if they are better than we are… and we justify and accept the status quo of the present situation.
You may be white, like I am, but maybe you are from a small town, trying to get thought a career in a big city; maybe your parents did not go to university and you feel you are not well accepted in some educated groups, maybe you start a small business, a professional such as lawyer or architect and you are not into some social elite groups, lobbies or economic establishment groups of any level, and you feel you have not the same success some others do because they got there some decades or centuries before… maybe you think you are white, but the truth is you are not. Power and social elites discriminate us all.
He describes the social dysfunctions that he has learned and his fears about them. Fears about their prevalence over time, about they can influence his son’s condition him and about how telling them or not, may how determine his existence.
I am a 45 year old, white (well I mean I think I am white), European citizen who lives far away from that environment and society. However I believe this book is not about America’s racial discrimination, it is about the lack of implementation of our western values in any democratic country around the world.
English is not my mother tongue and I am not familiar with some characters and references, such as leaders, characters and civil rights activists that are mentioned in the book. However I believe most of the message of the book could be applied to any social rights movement, to any social, gender, sexual orientation discrimination in any western country.
Besides the author's pessimism about change or about the future, the book is full of love, fatherhood guidance, acceptance of difference, respect, hope and tolerance for the values that he is claiming for: we were all created equal.