Between The World And Me

'The powerful story of a father's past and a son's future. Coates offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son's life...this moving, potent testament might have been titled Black Lives Matter.' Kirkus Reviews (starred) 'I've been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates. The language of Between the World and Me, like Coates' journey, is visceral, eloquent and beautifully redemptive. And its examination of the hazards and hopes of black male life is as profound as it is revelatory. This is required reading.' -- Toni Morrison 'I just finished an advance copy of Between the World and Me, a look at the racial history of our country by Ta-Nehisi Coates. It's really powerful and emotional.' -- John Legend Wall Street Journal 'Extraordinary...Ta-Nehisi Coates...writes an impassioned letter to his teenage son-a letter both loving and full of a parent's dread-counselling 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 New Yorker 'As a meditation on race in America, haunted by the bodies of black men, women, and children, Coates's compelling, indeed stunning, work is rare in its power to make you want to slow down and read every word. This is a book that will be hailed as a classic of our time.' Publishers Weekly '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 400 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. An instant classic and a gift to us all.' -- Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns 'An artful confrontation with America's relationship with race...If this isn't the kind of thing you usually read, pick it up. Necessary reading for the historical moment we're in.' BookRiot 'A searing meditation on what it means to be black in America today...as compelling a portrait of a father-son relationship as Martin Amis's Experience or Geoffrey Wolff's The Duke of Deception, and a showcase for Mr Coates's emotional reach as a writer and his both lyric and gritty prose.' New York Times '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 has written a book about immense and ongoing failures of humanity that is a triumph of humanism in itself, a book that renders the injuries of racism brutally near and real.' Slate 'Part memoir, part diary, and wholly necessary...Coates's knives are deadly, and they strip away the fat from truths passingly familiar to many but lived by only a few. It is an indictment.' New Republic 'Brilliant...[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.' Washington Post '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.' Michael Chabon 'Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me is in the same mode of The Fire Next Time; it is a book designed to wake you up.' Guardian '[An] uncategorizable tour-de-force...Between the World and Me feels as personal as a published work can. Sprawling, discursive, angry, relevant, lyrical...an unrelenting frank work expressed so perfectly that the truth of it resonates with every word.' STARRED review, Shelf Awareness