#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 • ONE OF OPRAH’S “BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH” • NOW AN HBO ORIGINAL SPECIAL EVENT
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 THE
NEW YORK TIMES ’S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY • NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL BOOKS
OF THE DECADE BY CNN • NAMED ONE OF PASTE ’ S BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE • A KIRKUS REVIEWS
BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE CENTURY ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times
Book Review O: The Oprah Magazine The Washington Post People Entertainment Weekly Vogue
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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.
