A review by moonstrucksue
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad fast-paced

5.0

“So I feared not just the violence of this world but the rules designed to protect you from it, the rules that would have you contort your body to address the block, and contort again to be taken seriously by colleagues, and contort again so as not to give the police a reason. All my life I’d heard people tell their black boys and black girls to “be twice as good,” which is to say “accept half as much.” These words would be spoken with a veneer of religious nobility, as though they evidenced some unspoken quality, some undetected courage, when in fact all they evidenced was the gun to our head and the hand in our pocket. This is how we lose our softness. This is how they steal our right to smile.”

I vow 2025 will be the year I will start reading more non-fiction books. Between the World and Me is another excellent read after ‘The Message’. Coates weaves America’s haunting history from trans-Atlantic slavery to modern-day struggles of Black people particularly Black men. This memoir acts as a letter of the author to his son. The narrative and timbre is quite intimate. As a sucker for evocative and poetic writing Coates always delivers. Honestly,  I have several passages that I wanted to highlight from this memoir, the haunting, the challenging but also the reflective parts that Coates imbued in his storytelling.  

As Toni Morrison recommended Between the World and Me should be a required reading.
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