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Between the World and Me

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Original price $26.00
Original price $26.00 - Original price $26.00
Original price $26.00
Current price $13.00
$13.00 - $13.00
Current price $13.00

About a year ago, I had the privilege to join several of my fellow black and white leaders, pastors and citizens in Columbia on a tour of some important Civil Rights landmarks in Alabama. The experience began a spirit of change and opened my heart to listening and understanding the Black experience. This was one of the books I picked up at the Equal Justice Initiative's bookstore and devoured it within a week. It's insightful, heavy, colorful and poetic. For many of my white friends, it will be a hard memoir to swallow, but important to listen and understand. For many of my black friends, it may be all too real, yet affirming and supportive.

–Bryson

From the Publisher
NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL BOOKS OF THE DECADE BY CNN • 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.