#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 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 PASTE'S BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY 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.
