Between the World and Me

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, 152 pages.
Coates is a national correspondent for the Atlantic and was perhaps best known, before this book, for his June, 2014 cover-story "The Case for Reparations."
This book is written as a letter to Coate's 15 year-old son in the wake of the killings of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, John Crawford, and others by police officers, and following the announcement that the Ferguson police would suffer no legal consequences following Michael Brown's death,
Coates tells his son of the complex codes he grew up with and internalized on the streets and in the schools of Baltimore in the 1980's, and of his introduction to the wider world, particularly the wider world of black experience and black thought, when he attended Howard University in the early 1990s. Coates interweaves these personal experiences with his beliefs concerning the vulnerability of the black body to wanton destruction visited it by those in authority, and he contrasts all this with his thoughts about "the Dream;" the suburban version of the American dream, reserved for those of us who are allowed to "believe that they are white . . . " This dream, Coates contends, is often built upon a foundation of the bones and broken bodies, "achieved through . . . the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents. . ."
A slim,but powerful book. Highly recommended.(by me and by Toni Morrison, though maybe hers is the more thoughtful, weighty, and relevant recommendation).

Check our catalog.