Between the World and Me
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
A letter from the author to his teenage son, in which he reflects upon what it means to be black in contemporary America. Between the World and Me found immediate critical and popular acclaim upon publication; it won Coates a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle award, and was named on of Time‘s best nonfiction books of the decade.
Recommendations from our site
“I think he’s an astounding African-American public intellectual. He writes for the Atlantic. In this book he says many things: some of them related to the police, some of them related to institutional racism in the United States. He constantly refers to his body. He had a very close friend who was in college with him — an average college person, he wasn’t involved in street crime or anything like that — and this guy was killed just 20 feet from his house by a police officer. So when Coates keeps talking about his body I think he’s literally talking about the fact that his body could be dead any time he meets a police officer. I think it’s metaphorically about how he and other African Americans feel endangered in this society.” Read more...
The best books on Race and American Policing
Joe Domanick, Journalist
Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s acclaimed book—written as a letter to his adolescent son—is incredibly moving to listen to as an audiobook.
Narrator: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Length: 3 hours and 35 minutes
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