Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Politics & government

BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Notes on the First 150 Years in America

BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME is a bold and beautifully written investigation of America's racial history and its contemporary echoes from one of the country's leading public intellectuals, a George Polk Journalism Award recipient, and “the single best writer on the subject of race in the United States” (New York Observer). In the tradition of slender but ambitious volumes on race from The Souls of Black Folks to The Fire Next Time, this work redefines our understanding of race and the roots of American identity.

For Ta-Nehisi Coates, history has always been personal. At every stage of his life, he's sought in his explorations of history answers to the mysteries that surrounded him -- most urgently, why he, and other black people he knew, seemed to live in fear. What were they afraid of? In this powerful book, Coates takes readers along on his journey through America's history of race and its contemporary resonances through a series of awakenings -- moments when he discovered some new truth about America’s long, tangled history of race, whether through his myth-busting professors at Howard University, a trip to a Civil War battlefield with a rogue historian, a journey to Chicago's South Side to visit aging survivors of 20th century America's "long war on black people," or a visit with the mother of a beloved friend who was shot down by the police. In his trademark style -- a mix of lyrical personal narrative, reimagined history, essayistic argument, and reportage -- Coates provides readers a thrillingly illuminating new framework for understanding race: its history, our contemporary dilemma, and where we go from here.

His work has changed the conversation on race and history in America: his cover story for the Atlantic, “The Case For Reparations” was one of the most eagerly awaited and widely discussed works of journalism of the year. It generated twice as many sales for the print version of the magazine and the web traffic for the piece was the highest ever recorded on TheAtlantic.com. More importantly, it was awarded the presitigious George Polk Journalism Award for Commentary. This book picks up where that article left off, and deepens and expands the argument.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor at The Atlantic and the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle (Spiegel & Grau, 2008). His profile has grown exponentially since that publication; his blog, www.ta-nehisi.com, has a million+ readers. Coates' pieces for The Atlantic, his op-eds for The New York Times, and lectures and media appearances have made him one of the most popular and beloved young journalists in America. He was named the #1 most influential African American of 2014 in The Root's annual Black 100 feature; he was named one of the 50 most influential political voices of 2014 in the Politico's annual ranking. A recent student of French language, he has spent time in Paris over the last couple of years and been a Visiting Fellow at the American Library in Paris.

Available products
Book Published 2015-07-14 by Spiegel & Grau
Book Published 2015-07-14 by Spiegel & Grau

Comments

Ta-Nehisi Coates was speaking to me, too, one father to another, teaching me that real courage is the courage to be vulnerable, to admit having fallen short of the mark, to stay open-hearted and curious in the face of hate and lies, to remain skeptical when there is so much comfort in easy belief.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is the James Baldwin of our era, and this is his cri de coeur. A brilliant thinker at the top of his powers, he has distilled 400 years of history and his own anguish and wisdom into a prayer for his beloved son and an invocation to the conscience of his country. An instant classic and a gift to us all.

After years of writing candidly and provocatively about race in modern America, this spring Ta-Nehisi Coates dusted off a 150-year-old issue--and ignited one of the most surprising intellectual debates of 2014. It was time, he wrote in a 16,000-word Atlantic cover story, for an 'an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts.' 'The Case for Reparations,' broke single-day traffic records on the Atlantic's website...a powerful example of how a single author can refuse to let an issue disappear--no matter how much Americans might ignore what he calls the 'dying embers of the same old racism' that has existed throughout the country's history.

Powerful and passionate…profoundly moving…a searing meditation on what it means to be black in America today.

Immense, multifaceted…This is a poet's book, revealing the sensibility of a writer to whom words—exact words—matter…As a meditation on race in America, haunted by the bodies of black men, women, and children, Coates's compelling, indeed stunning, work is rare in its power to make you want to slow down and read every word. This is a book that will be hailed as a classic of our time.

Brilliant…[Coates] is firing on all cylinders, and it is something to behold: a mature writer entirely consumed by a momentous subject and working at the extreme of his considerable powers at the very moment national events most conform to his vision.

I just finished an advance copy of Between the World and Me, a look at the racial history of our country by Ta-Nehisi Coates. It’s really powerful and emotional.

A work of rare beauty and revelatory honesty.... profund... immensely erudite but never showy.

The powerful story of a father's past and a son's future. Coates 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... this moving, potent testament might have been titled Black Lives Matter.

UK/ ANZ: Text Publishing ; Danish: Gylendal; France: Autrement ; Netherland: Amsterdam University Press

The blog of Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of the half-dozen best in the English-speaking world. His continuing chronicle of his exploration of the history and meaning of the Civil War…crackles and fizzes with insight and discovery. He is intellectually fearless, liberal in politics and temperament but unshackled by political or racial ideology, humane in his judgments, respectful of facts, acutely aware of the difference between what is knowable and what is not.

Obama’s statement also made me think of Between the World and Me, an extraordinary forthcoming book by Ta-Nehisi Coates, in which he writes an impassioned letter to his teen-age son—a letter both loving and full of a parent’s dread—counselling him on the history of American violence against the black body, the young African-American’s extreme vulnerability to wrongful arrest, police violence, and disproportionate incarceration.