"Coates originally set off to write a book about writing in the tradition of Orwell's classic
Politics and the English Language but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how
our stories -- our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking -- expose and distort
our realities. The first of the book's three intertwining essays is set in Dakar Senegal.
Despite being raised as a strict Afrocentrist -- and named for Nubian pharaoh -- Coates had
never set foot on the African continent until now. He roams the 'steampunk' city of 'old
traditions and new machinery ' meeting with strangers and dining with local writers who quiz
him in French about African American politics. But everywhere he goes he feels as if he's in
two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and a mythic kingdom in his mind the pan-African
homeland he was raised to believe was the origin and destiny for all black people. Finally he
travels to the slave castles off the coast and touches the ocean that carried his ancestors
away in chains -- and has his own reckoning with the legacy of the Afrocentric dream. Back in
the USA he takes readers along with him to Columbia South Carolina where he explores a
different mythology this one enforced on its subjects by the state. He enters the world of the
teacher whose job is threatened for teaching one of Coates's own books and discovers a
community of mostly white supporters who were transformed and even radicalized by the stories
they discovered in the 'racial reckoning' of 2020. But he also explores the backlash to this
reckoning and the deeper myths and stories of the community -- a capital of the confederacy
with statues of segregationists looming over the its public squares. In Palestine the longest
of the essays he discovers the devastating gap between the narratives we've accepted and the
clashing reality of life on the ground. He meets with activists and dissidents Israelis and
Palestinians -- the old who remember their dispossessions on two continents and the young who
have only known struggle and disillusionment. He travels into Jerusalem the heart of Zionist
mythology and to the occupied territories where he sees the reality the myth is meant to
hide. It is this hidden story that draws him in and profoundly changes him -- and makes the war
that would soon come all the more devastating"--
