Between the World and Me (utgåvan 2015)

Although Coates’s story of how race impacted his life is moving, this book paints a pretty bleak picture. The end is especially disappointing - the book sort of just stops. It’s hard to see what the point of it was, other than, “the more you know.” ( )

heart-rending

"The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.

Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy."" A Kirkus starred review, www.kirkusreviews.com

Wow -- I found this collection of texts written for his son very powerful, illuminating, and terrifying. The discussion of racism as the foundation for the American Dream, the reminder that folks who identify as white need to realize that they only think they are white, but that this thinking allows for them to have the Dream without realizing what they and the institutions of this country have done to ensure racism stays at the foundation, and the daily physical encounters of this racism with the fear and powerlessness that goes hand in hand make this a must-read. ( )

I liked the book and felt a lot of shame and anger and sadness while reading it (all good things to feel when reading, I think), but I found it surprisingly slow going for such a short book. Coates really shines when dealing in particulars -- his reflections on his times at Howard and in Paris were especially good, as was the anecdote of his young son being shoved -- and shines less when he waxes more figurative and abstract. I liked that it was framed as a letter to his son. I think my expectations for the book were extremely high and that it fell a little short of my expectations as a whole, which were based purely on hype and so weren't really fair. The book surely inclines me to read more by Coates and by some of the authors he mentions with whose work I am woefully and perhaps tellingly unfamiliar. ( )