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. 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?īetween the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. 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. 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. This means that if you choose to purchase, I’ll make a small commission.) Between the World and Me Synopsisīetween the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates We’ve also included some thoughtful (and thought provoking) reviews of the book.Īnd…if you are keen to explore this topic further, we suggest three books for your reading list.

Start with the synopsis, does it accurately reflect your experience of the book? Then use our 10 book club questions for Between the World and Me to get more conversation flowing. In order to help your group get started, we’ve developed this discussion guide, which includes Between the World and Me book club questions. But we need to talk about race, and Coates is helping us do that. This book is not a light read, and it won’t make for a light book club conversation either. This book was both an Oprah pick and it also won the National Book Award. He fears for the Black body and how our culture has not been able to shake discrimination. In the book he talks without sentiment (or frankly much hope) about the state of race in the US. While this epistolary is directed to his son, it’s also aimed directly at us. In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates packed all of the punches and pulled none of them.

Coates between the world and me