Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
“Between the World and Me” was a quick read; not for its brevity or Ta-Nehisi Coates’s masterful economy of words, but because I couldn’t put it down. And when I did, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Or about the timeliness of its message given the unprecedented level of national dysfunction we’ve endured since its publication in 2015. Written in epistolary form to his son, the author’s first person narrative helped me better understand my own original family in ways I hadn’t considered before. It made me reflect on how I have raised my sons, inevitably having infused a set of fears and expectations in doing so that may not be unique, but collective among many parents.
Throughout the book, each sentence was packed with so much power and wisdom that I bookmarked many pages, returning several times to reread them. It would be unfair to quote any of them out of context since the narrative is so tightly woven and cohesive, even though I identified at least six major facets within its overall theme. One of the most chilling passages regarding the issue of struggle is on page 71:
“Perhaps struggle is all
we have because the god of history is an atheist, and nothing
about his world is meant to be. So you must wake up
every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable,
least of all the promise of waking up at all. This is not despair.
These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs
over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope.”
I would recommend this book for anyone concerned about what I believe is our greatest national issue, the same issue that defines the least attractive aspect of ‘American’. “Between the World and Me” is intimate in its delivery yet universal in scope, an eloquently transformative book that can enlighten us all.
Photo Credit: Jonathan Alcorn / Reuters. Demonstrators block a Los Angeles interstate, protesting the shooting of an unarmed black 25-year-old in August 2014.
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