Between the World and Me (One World Essentials)
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • ONE OF OPRAH’S “BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH” • NOW AN HBO ORIGINAL SPECIAL EVENT
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 • A KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE CENTURY • AN OPRAH DAILY BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE PAST TWO DECADES
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.
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 • A KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE CENTURY • AN OPRAH DAILY BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE PAST TWO DECADES
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.
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Community Reviews
I really enjoyed this book. There is so much truth and passion in what Coates is writing about. I recommend this for high school seniors and beyond.
This book is about the author's experience as a black man in The United States of America. Dear reader, who not a person of color, I recommend this book. The author delivers a powerful message of what is like to live as a black man in the USA. It is not pleasant.
The phrase that succeeded in yanking my head to an oblique angle came just one page into Ta-Nehisi Coates's polemic work.
"Americans who believe that they are white."
It was a flip in perspective that instantly explained so much about my failure to understand "race" in America. It explained why I've always felt so awkward checking the "White" box on demographic surveys. My ancestors came from the desert by way of Eastern Europe and Russia. They endowed me with a broad spectrum of color. We're not white. We've never been white. "White" was a fabrication needed to justify the enslavement of a people. There is no white.
About a page later, Coates writes, "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." That line twisted my head the rest of the way around.
This book is devastatingly clear minded and courageous. It's the manner of courage that only comes from anger engendered over generations. I wondered, of the thousands who have read his book, how many started off as I did believing they were liberal minded and enlightened only to be mercilessly slapped down and reawakened?
But surely this book isn't written for us -- Americans who think of themselves as white -- but for Coates' son and his generation and the children to follow. As Coates says in the final passages, "They made us a race. We made ourselves a people." The struggle continues with little to point to in the way of progress as rare voices like Coates' make us feel equally ashamed and proud to be human.
"Americans who believe that they are white."
It was a flip in perspective that instantly explained so much about my failure to understand "race" in America. It explained why I've always felt so awkward checking the "White" box on demographic surveys. My ancestors came from the desert by way of Eastern Europe and Russia. They endowed me with a broad spectrum of color. We're not white. We've never been white. "White" was a fabrication needed to justify the enslavement of a people. There is no white.
About a page later, Coates writes, "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." That line twisted my head the rest of the way around.
This book is devastatingly clear minded and courageous. It's the manner of courage that only comes from anger engendered over generations. I wondered, of the thousands who have read his book, how many started off as I did believing they were liberal minded and enlightened only to be mercilessly slapped down and reawakened?
But surely this book isn't written for us -- Americans who think of themselves as white -- but for Coates' son and his generation and the children to follow. As Coates says in the final passages, "They made us a race. We made ourselves a people." The struggle continues with little to point to in the way of progress as rare voices like Coates' make us feel equally ashamed and proud to be human.
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