Ta-Nehisi Coates's "Between the World and Me" is the next book you should read

Cory Doctorow / 4:06 pm Fri

Between the World and Me is the memoir of Ta-Nehisi Coates -- certified genius and author of many seminal essays on race in America. It is a work of rage and beauty, and it should be the very next thing you read.

Between the World and Me is structured as a letter from Coates to his 15 year old son, written in a poetic and wise voice. It's modelled on James Baldwin's 1963 civil rights classic The Fire Next Time, which was a pair of letters to Baldwin's nephew, and the format serves both writers well, anchoring the wide-ranging political discussion in an intense and personal communique in which an elder desperately wishes to impart both bravery and caution to a younger man.

Coates writes as an atheist who was raised by activists, who grew up in the black neighborhoods of Baltimore and came to consciousness about race in America through a combination of patient instruction, parental beatings, first-hand experience, and the tragedy of his friend's death at the hands of a policeman who walked away from the murder without any consequence.

Coates's story is, above all, filled with his path to understanding. It's the story of how he came to understand the anger of his parents, the alienation of his peers, the violence of his streets. It's the story of how he reconciled with the faith of the civil rights pioneers who advised young men like him to allow their bodies to be passively smashed by racist billyclubs, how he came to understand America and its relationship to the stolen bodies and lives of his ancestors.

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