Synopsis:
This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.”
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.
Review:
Between the world and me is very well written. It’s a letter written to the author son. In this letter the author talks about growing up in the hood of Baltimore Maryland and seeing kids his age with guns. He also talked about the injustice system against black people in America.
In this letter the author also talked about how hard it is being black in America and how life is rigged for a lot of black men. Reading this made me think about about my own son and how having this talk is very important.
This letter set the stage for young black American kids to learn and understand that being born black is a automatic crime and there’s really nothing to do about it. But I plan to instill this same knowledge to my son that you are black first before anything else.
Be proud of who you are yet live life definely. I enjoyed the writing this was also an emotional read for me because everything stated in this letter is true. Definitely a 5 ⭐ star read and I’ll will be re reading this again soon.
Rating: 5 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐