Between the World and Me

Written by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Narrated by Ta-Nehisi Coates

#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 • AN OPRAH DAILY BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE PAST TWO DECADES

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, 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
• Release date: Jul 14, 2015
• ISBN: 9780147520500

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates (Baltimore, 1975) es editor en la revista The Atlantic, donde escribe artículos sobre cultura, política y temas sociales. Su labor periodística ha sido premiada en varias ocasiones. Anteriormente, había trabajado en The Village Voice, Washington City Paper y Time, y había colaborado con The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Washington Monthly y O Magazine entre otras publicaciones. Es autor del libro de memorias The Beautiful Struggle y de Entre el mundo y yo (Seix Barral, 2017), ganador del National Book Award 2015 de no ficción y en la lista de más vendidos del New York Times desde su publicación, además de ser considerado «uno de los diez mejores libros del año» por las publicaciones más prestigiosas.

Reviews for Between the World and Me

[gllyons-120926 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book made me cry. The myths America tells itself leave out so much, and the American Dream leaves devastation in its wake.

[siok-76276 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A brutally searing and honest account of what it means to live as a colored person in America. It was surprising that this book was written in 2015 and hence presented a not-too-distant past (I had thought it was written much earlier). The fear and injustice that an African-American feels and carries is ever-present. I am not an American but it got me thinking about whether the minorities in my country feel this way too.

[kalliegrace · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Excellent. This reminds me of Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, but with more recent examples of the same old things. Black bodies being used to prop up systems of oppression, and a father who wants better for the next generation.

[cbl_tn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

One of the interesting things we learn about Coates in this book is that he was trained from childhood to put his thought processes and feelings into words. That’s great training for a journalist! Through his gift of words, Coates speaks for a large segment of society with similar lived experiences. Reading (or in my case, listening) is the first step toward understanding.

[notannakarina · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A classic that should be a fixture in American high school/university literature and civics classes. That's all.

[rscottm182gmailcom · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Eye-opening (if you're not black) account of what an intelligent man thinks of being a black American. Hard to read if you like to think of America as a fair society. Set as a letter to the author's teenage son, the author speaks mostly from his own experience, warning his son what to expect from America as an adult - it won't be entirely bleak, but it won't be pretty.

[tip44 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A genuinely amazing read. It is rare for me to realize that a book will occupy my thoughts for many years to come when I still in the process of am reading it. This book has many ideas that I will be chewing over and fitting against everyday life for a very long time.

[elenchus_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

From reviews and other secondary accounts, I'd gathered one of Coates's key positions here is that the American Dream is in fact a charade, allowing whites to continue abusing blacks even as they believe the reason(s) for the black nation's current situation lie entirely with the choices / lesser capabilities / beliefs made by those black people. After reading, this is indeed a major statement: the Dream relies upon exploitation, specifically that species pushed by White Supremacists.

And this particular Dream relies too upon complicity: depends upon those who benefit from it, allowing it to continue. "The mettle that it takes to look away from the horror of our prison system, from police forces transformed into armies, from the long war against the black body, is not forged overnight. This is the practiced habit of jabbing out one's eyes and forgetting the work of one's hands." [98]

Coates does not frame the point as the American Dream depending in principle upon racial terror in order to work, merely that it does so in fact. A key question for me, then: Is the American Dream feasible, workable for all people, without the underpinnings of racial terror or even racial inequality? (And: is racial inequality ever pragmatic without racial terror? They are separate, to be sure, but can the one effectively exist without the other, given human nature? To replace "racial inequality" with any other basis for inequality, remains substantially the same question.)

//

Rhetorically clever of Coates to address the essay to black people, and pointedly to his son. If economically successful, the book would be read by more white people than black, this would have been abundantly clear to Coates. I find myself on the margins of a conversation never addressed to me, yet just as clearly intended for me. The observations, criticisms, characterisations ... I can take offense, of course: readers always have open to them any reaction whatsoever. But a moment's reflection makes it clear, these barbs land only if I steer them toward myself. (A white body.) They were not thrown my way. It lends another layer of significance to any sufficiently self-aware reader.

//

Various quotes from Baldwin reinforce my intention to read his essays. "The people who believe they are white." [42, 133]

Title borrowed from a Richard Wright poem, and Coates uses the opening lines as epigraph. These were new to me, and an ugly shock. I imagine they are familiar to many black Americans.

Originally the idea was to create a review exclusively from selected quotations: my notes identify enough to do this, still would be worthwhile.

[raschneid_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book explores race as cultural mythology, as an environmental hazard, as a lifeline. I was captivated by the blending of historical analysis and memoir and Coates' intellectual rigor in dealing with emotionally charged subject matter.

I especially recommend the audiobook, read by the author.

[andjhostet-527429 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Honestly I really struggled with how I feel about this book, and Coates in general. This book made me think a lot about society and race relations in the 21st century, and for that, I'm grateful. But I do have a lot of issues with it. As an author, I think he's a great writer, in the sense that his writing is evocative, but feels a little unfocused, and ultimately pointless.

This book is more of the same. The premise is that this is a letter to his son, to explain his perspective on the world. However it constantly flakes between self indulgent rant, and formal argument trying to convince the readers of his logic.

But what is he trying to convince his son/readers? That the world sucks? That racism is real, and affects black peoples' perception of the world? That isn't something that a reader interested in this book doesn't already know.

Coates asks a lot of really interesting and important questions, but does not attempt to answer any of them. Instead he just rants and complains about the fact that the world is the way it is that one needs to ask these questions.

To make no comments on the class disparity and class struggle of black people, and to make no critique on the ultra-capitalistic society that perpetuates and promotes this systemic racism, is frankly baffling. All the while speaking/pandering to white people, and making a lot of money doing so, makes me look him differently.

Side note: but while looking at reviews and attempting to formulate some of my thoughts on this book, I noticed that every review that amounted to "10/10, this book is a masterpiece and an important look at race in the 21st century" was always written by a white person, and every review that was highly critical of Coates and his writing was written by a black person. No idea why this is or what it implies, but I thought it was interesting and worth mentioning.

[jonbrammer-788089 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Between the World and Me was recently added to our county English curriculum, after entering the national conversation on race through its incendiary take on 9-11, police brutality, and the rhetoric about the war on the black body.

Toni Morrison's blurb mentions James Baldwin, but I think more of Ralph Ellison and the "Battle Royale" scene from Invisible Man. The risk of violence to the black body is the central motif in both texts. Coates refers to "The Dreamers" as "those who believe that they are white", as those people whose beliefs perpetuate our particular form of racial violence and oppression. Whiteness as a concept perpetuates the American mythology of race. Coates ends with an apocalyptic connection between the symbol of the automobile and the Dreamers' fear and violence against blacks, saying "It is the flight from us that sent them sprawling into the undivided woods. And the method of transport through these new subdivisions, across the sprawl, is the automobile, the noose around the neck of the earth, and ultimately, the Dreamers themselves."

2nd reading; even more powerful. How can we find redemption from our original sin of white supremacy?

[amcheri-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I don't know that I can add anything that hasn't already been said by just about any of the reviews I've seen about this book.

The author's voice - both written and spoken - is clear and authentic and powerful. As a white woman who grew up in a racial diverse family in a racially diverse area, there were some things in the book that I absolutely recognized but even more that I'll never experience. I highly recommend this book to everyone.

[steve02476 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The writing was lyrical, poetic, and forceful - but I didn't love the book. I like this kind of writing in fiction and it's also fine in a memoir, which is what this book partly is. But the book also goes into history and anthropology and social analysis - and in this case I'm completely undone by emotional and metaphorical writing. When the topic is reality I need some clear explication of facts that are provably right or wrong. Is it a fact that Coates feels the way he feels? Sure, I'll grant that. But is what he says about how society has been working (and works today) true in an objective way? He hasn't made the case, and didn't even try to make the case. That's his right of course, but it left me without much to go on besides "this is how Coates feels about society" and truthfully I'm just not that fascinated by how any one person views the world -- I want to learn more about the world itself, as much as I can anyway.

[kavinay-677830 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

As a father, this book hits home.

Beautiful black bodies.
People who want to be white.

Coates touches on so many aspects of the lived experience of racialized person that you catch yourself nodding at the familiarity of his text.

[formerenglishteacher · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I listened to this book narrated by the author, Ta-Nahisi Coates. I had read Coates’ book “We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy” and knew immediately that he was a major American writer. His writing is nothing short of masterful. Having said that, I must say, getting through “Between the World and Me” was difficult, but I’m glad I did. Coates apologizes for nothing related to his race, nor should he. In fact he holds much of what the nonviolent civil rights fighters’ stood for in disdain. His heroes were his father’s Black Panther brothers. Brothers like Malcolm X. Coates’ theme through out this book, which is a letter to his son, is that the capture and control of a Black person’s body is as much a threat today as it was in the South during slavery. He can’t help but see his son in the Black men of the past couple of decades who have died because they were Black: Trevon Martin, Michael Brown, and enough others to fill an entire Wikipedia page. In fact, there are so many Wikipedia has to separate them by the year they were slain. And the one that struck Coates to the quick: Prince Jones. Jones was undoubtedly the Perfect Black Man at Howard University, Coates’ alma mater. Jones’s death affected Coates in a life-changing way, a way that caused him to fear for his son’s life as he grew up. Coates’ faith in his country and his people’s ability to make it in this world was shaken to its core by Jones’s death at the hands of the police. The book will shake anyone’s faith in this country, and leave that person with a doubt about whether the promise of Dr. Martin Luther King can ever be realized. This is an important book for people of all races but most especially people of the White race.

[squeakychu · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I chose this book to read in my quest to read more books by black authors. it is written as a letter from Ta-Nehisi Coates to his son about the divide between the black and white worlds. Sadly, I think he has this right. This is a powerful and depressing book, leaving me in tears at the end, because the struggle continues.

This to me is a fascinating and eye-opening read. Over the years I have tried to understand the black culture in various ways, but I think Coates puts it all out there with the idea that no black man’s body is ever safe. I knew this partially, but his description of life as a child in west Baltimore, where I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in what I considered a safe Jewish community, is nothing like the dangerous and violent black community in which he grew up during the 1980s. Oddly enough, we both ended up in Chocolate City, a name that used to be applied to Washington, DC. We are a generation apart. I felt a need to be part of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, but I was afraid of Malcolm X because of his rage. To Coates, Malcolm X was a hero because his rage was an outgrowth of his experience and his knowledge. I now feel a need to revisit Malcolm X’s world. Being that I am not black, I don’t anticipate being able to fully understand it, but I want to try. He did equate Martin Luther King with the Dream (or the white experience).

I love the part of this book that describes Howard University as a Mecca. It is such an amazing part of Washington, DC, and I enjoyed reading about the author’s experiences there.

The second part of the book in which Coates talks about experiences with his young son made me fear for all black parents of young children, especially those with sons. The author puts his personal terror into words which make the reader feel it. To those who never felt such terror, such as myself, it will be my duty going forward to understand it and act on it in a positive way.

I am hoping to be able to read The Beautiful Struggle, the memoirs of the author, in the future.

[sturlington_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes with a rhythm and a lyricism that is like poetry or song, and that makes this book about a very difficult subject very easy, and almost pleasant, to read. I did not agree with everything he said, but more than once he made me think differently about a subject--race in America--that I already thought I was fairly well educated about. And from the start, he challenged me, in an uncomfortable but ultimately rewarding way. This book was published in 2015, but as the backlash to Black Lives Matter continues to whip itself into a frenzy, attacking imaginary demons like "critical race theory," I think it's more important than ever that we are made to feel uncomfortable, because people who are comfortable do not change.

[dairyqueen84 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

With all that's been said about this book, I had high expectations that weren't met. At times the prose was unintellible.

[chuff-155902 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Coates is certainly a talented writer. I was moved by this account, which similar to the classic The Fire Next Time, takes the form of a letter from a father to his son.

I do not recall ever reading an entire book in a single day. That says all I feel I need to say about this one.

[tsmom1219 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

If I could give this 10 stars, I would. As Toni Morrison blurbed, "This is required reading." I borrowed it from the library but plan to buy my own copy. I want to read it again and annotate. This would be an excellent choice for One Book, One Community, should Champaign-Urbana ever decide to do that again.

[nanettels · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Powerful and poetic essays from a father to his son. The audiobook was especially moving.

[ms_rowse · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Read this. And as you read, don't judge, don't think of counter-arguments, even if what you are reading is uncomfortable for you. If it is uncomfortable for you, imagine how it felt for Coates to live and process and write this book. Read and listen and try to understand. I loved every eye-opening sentence.

[janepat-619237 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Ta-Nehisi takes you through his very interesting childhood and young adulthood, guided by a father who runs an African bookstore. His life and writing and struggles are intriguing. It offers an easy to read perspective on his life as a young black man. Race is not the only theme or reason to read the book. It's a terrific story. It's short, and I'm OK with short books !

[fionaanne · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Coates' prose is lovely.

[nosborm · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Powerful. So intense that I had to set the book aside so I could process what I just read and take a moment to collect myself. Accessible, intelligent, passionate, heart wrenching writing. This book really opened my eyes and I'd recommend it to everyone.

[castlelass · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book is a memoir in the form of a letter to the author’s teenage son. Coates provides his perspective about what it means to have a black body in the United States. He believes that the desire to hate requires an “other” perceived as inferior. He goes into the history of how this perspective originated in slavery and its follow-on effects in today’s society.

The book is structured in three parts. The first describes his childhood, his college years at Howard University, and how his views on race have changed over time. The second covers the killing of Prince Jones, one of his classmates at Howard, by police. The third describes Coates’ visit to Prince Jones’ mother, Dr. Mable Jones.

This book discusses violence, fear, and the gap in the American Dream. It gets at the crux of Black Lives Matter. The writing is eloquent and filled with literary and musical references. I found it enlightening and moving.

[moukayedr · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I listened to the Audio version of this book read by the author. It is a short book with a profound message that cannot be taken lightly. I listened and re-listened to some passages to get as much as possible of the references.

The book is a letter from the author to his Samari, it details the singularity of the black experience in America and emphasizes the struggle to protect the "black body" from plunder. It is an important piece of writing that should be read by anyone who needs to know why the slogan "black lives matter" is important.

Even for someone from a completely different background, the author makes you feel deeply what it is like to be born black. Young people who hide behind swagger talk and violence, to compensate for their own vulnerability. The tragedy of those promising lives cut short by the prejudice of a police force (white and black) that shoots first and asks questions later. Anyone who has been subjected to injustice can relate to this and it is an important testimony to the enduring struggle of African Americans.

[librolindsay · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Remarkable.

[theampersand · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I'm not sure who "Between the World and Me" was written for, though I did ask myself this question various times while reading it. I assume the book's epistolary framing -- it's written as a letter to Coates's son -- is more or less a literary device. But I think the distance referred to in the title -- the gulf that separates white experiences of the United States from black experiences of the United States -- is the book's other main preoccupation, and, in making it a central theme of his book, the author is specifically addressing his white readers. Coates takes aim, in other words, at white innocence.

Much of "Between the World and Me" concerns itself with describing the more difficult aspects of the black American experience. The author makes it clear to his reader that he considers being black in the United States to be a direct threat to his bodily integrity. The book is filled with the bluntest bodily metaphors imaginable: black bodies are constantly stolen, pillaged, and broken by both a system designed by white people and the black people who live in it. The author wants to make it clear that being black implies a certain risk and a certain fear: race and racism aren't about this or that minor incident, it's an experience that black people are never allowed to fully escape. In discussing white ideas about the United States -- which he refers to throughout as the Dream -- Coates makes it clear that he thinks that black Americans pay a real price for white Americans' innocence and that their misconceptions are not without real effect. The very real barrier between the America that Ta-Nehehisi was shown on TV and his own experience of the same country is what stands between the world and himself. The metaphor the author employs here might be said to be Platonic: Coates's years to step into the light of the world beyond American conceptions of race. This is an optimistic book, I think, in the end but not one one that provides too many easy answers or strives to forget what black Americans have lived through. I happen to agree with Coates on a lot of things, but even so, speaking as a white American, this was not a comfortable book to read. So much of "Between the World and Me" is what white Americans will have to give up to achieve true racial equality and to fulfill a promise that a lot of them believe was fulfilled a long time ago. I doubt a lot of them will read this book, but, well, them's the breaks.

"Between the World and Me" is certainly a political book, but, at the same time, it's also a surprisingly personal one. The book also functions as a sort of family memoir -- the author's family was fiercely protective of him, but fear seemed to play a larger role in their emotional lives than love did. They were also, unlike most of the black community, thorough non-believers who had no time at all for religiously oriented solutions to racial issues. Coates's upbringing was also unusual in that he seems always to have inhabited two worlds at once: his grandfather was a librarian at Howard University and he grew up in a house full of books while also attending a severely underfunded Baltimore public school where he had to dodge gang members every day. Many of his close relatives died deaths that were other than natural. Coates's didn't just learn about the problems facing black Americans during his trips to the library.

Right, the library! "Between the World and Me" could also be called a personal intellectual biography and a paean to Howard University, where Coates experienced the the thrilling breadth and depth of the global black experience -- what he calls the Spectrum -- and where he first encounters the black thinkers and artists with which he keeps up a dialogue throughout the book. The author is admirably forthright about his intellectual development, explaining why he was attracted to -- but later came to disagree with -- the views of Malcolm X. A library rat of the highest order, Coates seems to have devoured half of the Howard collection on his way to the realization that that many of black America's leading thinkers have always disagreed with each other. Coates's education -- and his time at Howard seems to have been an education in every sense of the word -- eventually helps put the American black experience -- and his own experience -- in a more global, humanistic context. It's progress that's hard won: it's not easy to admit that you've made mistakes in your past, never mind admitting it in print.

In the closing pages of "Between the World and Me", the author seems to come to understand what it might mean to transcend race, if only in some respects. He does this by traveling outside the United States, to France, where he finds himself less a black American than just another American. As a grown-up third culture kid and lifelong expat, I can feel him on this one. His time in France seems to close a sort of personal circle for him -- he even picks up the French classes that seemed so mysteriously useless to him in high school. But this physical journey, and the feeling of liberation that the author seems to feel at its end, also serves as a neat parallel to Coates's own remarkable progress in life, which stretches from mapping out gang territories in the roughest parts of Baltimore to hanging around parks in Paris. This one may not be for everyone. I'm sure some readers will find the book's tone to be too intense for their liking, but I suspect that this reflects Ta-Nehisi own personality and would prefer a less personal take on American racial relations. But "Between the World and Me" is still a success, a remarkable book that weaves the personal and political together effortlessly. Urgent, shocking, convincing and -- most of all -- recommended.

[ssperson_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I don't know how to review this book. I listened to it, and it was read by the author, which I think gave it even more gravitas than it would already have. I felt white guilt, horror, and helplessness while reading it. As often happens when I watch the news these days, I couldn't help but think, "How do we fix this?" Any answers to that would be appreciated.