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meemzter 's review for:
We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
This book is essentially a collection of pieces by Ta-Nehisi Coates originally published in The Atlantic. These are interspersed with retrospective chapters, introducing and contextualizing each essay. These introductory chapters function as part auto-biography, part self-critique, and come together nicely with the 8 essays - one for each year of Barack Obama's presidency - that Coates has selected for this volume.
I don't take the time to read as much non-fiction as I should, so despite Coates' preeminence, all of the writing in this volume was new to me. The commentary on the essays is both helpful and honest - some of these essays are better than others, some of them hold up to scrutiny better than others, some of them are more persuasive, better argued, more poignant. But all are thought-provoking and in my case, enlightening.
The highlights for me were 'Why do so few blacks study the civil war' and 'My President was black' - the former because it reshaped the way I think about civil war history and our retelling of it, the latter because it's magnificently insightful and even a little hopeful (and look, I love reading about Obama, what can I say).
All in all, I think the perspective offered in these essays is critically important. It definitely challenged me and left me with a lot of thoughts and a fresh way of thinking.
I don't take the time to read as much non-fiction as I should, so despite Coates' preeminence, all of the writing in this volume was new to me. The commentary on the essays is both helpful and honest - some of these essays are better than others, some of them hold up to scrutiny better than others, some of them are more persuasive, better argued, more poignant. But all are thought-provoking and in my case, enlightening.
The highlights for me were 'Why do so few blacks study the civil war' and 'My President was black' - the former because it reshaped the way I think about civil war history and our retelling of it, the latter because it's magnificently insightful and even a little hopeful (and look, I love reading about Obama, what can I say).
All in all, I think the perspective offered in these essays is critically important. It definitely challenged me and left me with a lot of thoughts and a fresh way of thinking.