Between the World and Me

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

• The Beautiful Struggle: A Memoir
• The Fire Next Time
• We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
• We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
• White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
• When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
• Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago's South Side
• Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (National Book Award Winner)
• The Souls of Black Folk (Dover Thrift Editions)