Book Review: Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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What shook me about this book wasn’t just the brilliance of the writing, though that alone is enough to stop you mid-sentence. It was the intimacy of it. Coates frames the whole book as a letter to his son, and there’s something about that form—raw, direct, father-to-son—that makes every page feel like you’re eavesdropping on a conversation that’s as personal as it is political.

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I felt that he was talking to me as well when I was reading it. The manner in which he describes the Black body, the ways by which it gets policed, feared, violated, and still finds joy, love, and beauty resonated with me on an intellectual and highly visceral level. It has a moment when he talks about how frail the body is when you live in an order that is made to dismantle it, and I tell you, in this case, I needed to put the book aside and take a breath. It made me wonder how much we are so absorbed that everything is fine to walk around and think that we are safe, when to some others, just surviving is a form of resistance.

What stuck with me most was the gut-punch moment, the one that actually occurred when he wrote of the death of Prince Jones, his friend. The novel is not a dressed-up story; it is simply told, yet it is told plainly enough to be unbearable. You can sense the burden of the injustice not only due to the loss, but because Coates relates it to the bigger picture, to centuries of history that rendered it not something of a particular accident, but of an inevitability. And the manner in which he talks it through with his son not sweetening it, not giving him false hope, broke something in me. No better it will all end. There’s only truth.

But it is not everything deep that stamps you down. It also made me smile at times, like when he recalls Howard University, the Mecca. The energy he talks about there, the debates, the sense of possibility, the beauty of being in an environment with such a diversity of different Blacknesses, it made me want to be in one of those classrooms, just to feel the spark. It’s one of those parts where the love comes through so strongly, love for culture, for history, for the brilliance of people carving space in a world that often denies their existence.

The thing that was left to me, though, was that Coates did not give me easy answers. Many race books, particularly those with a wide readership, are likely to conclude with some form of a call to hope, a step-by-step method of remedying the situation. Coates doesn’t do that. He doesn’t wrap it up. He informs his son and us that the battle is never over, we can never be safe, and that it is our duty to view the world as we are, not as we want to be. That sincerity... it was painful, yet it did sound needed.

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I was not uplifted when I closed the book. I was made to feel sober, heavy, and more awake. That’s the power of it. It compels you to see the things that you would prefer not to notice, and on the other hand, it makes you see the beauty of being strong, of telling stories, of telling the truth and not feeling ashamed of it.

So if I had to put it simply, Between the World and Me felt like sitting across from someone who refuses to lie to you, even if the truth stings. And in a world full of noise and platitudes, that kind of honesty is a gift.

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The last three images was gotten from web:

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