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Between the World and Me
Coates wrote this as a letter to his son explaining America. It is the most clear-eyed, unsentimental account of what race means in that country since James Baldwin.
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The Letter
Ta-Nehisi Coates's 2015 National Book Award winner is written as a letter to his teenage son Samori, a meditation on what it means to inhabit a Black body in the United States. Drawing on his own childhood in Baltimore, his years at Howard University, the death of his friend Prince Jones at the hands of a police officer, and his attempts to understand the history of a country built on the destruction of Black bodies, Coates writes without consolation or false hope. He was praised by Toni Morrison as having found the language that James Baldwin was searching for. The book sold over 1.5 million copies.


:JOURNEY
Reading Between the World and Me
3 Direct
3 Formative
3 Expanding
5 Devastating
4 Analytical
4 Unsettled

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The enslaved were not othered simply for profit. They were othered because it was profitable to do so.


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Coates was inspired by James Baldwin's 1963 The Fire Next Time, also written as a letter to a younger family member. Coates called Baldwin his literary ancestor and wanted to write the letter for his generation.
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Toni Morrison wrote the cover blurb for the first edition, saying Coates was one of the few writers who had the courage to look at the world as it is. The endorsement from Morrison was widely considered one of the highest in American letters.


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https://www.google.com/search?q=Between+the+World+and+Me+Ta-Nehisi+Coates+book
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