Between the World and Me

Hardcover, 152 pages

English language

Published Sept. 11, 2015 by Spiegel & Grau.

ISBN:
978-0-8129-9354-7
Copied ISBN!
OCLC Number:
923007023

View on OpenLibrary

5 stars (74 reviews)

In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden?

Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to …

13 editions

2022 #FReadom read 7/20

5 stars

"Race is the child of racism, not the father." - Ta-Nehisi Coates, from Between the World and Me, which was book #7 in my 2022 journey of reading books that have been challenged or removed from Texas libraries or schools.

The antilibrarians feign concern for reader "DISCOMFORT." But to me, the readers who find most discomfort in Coates or Kendi will be those whose starting-place was that of TAKING COMFORT in (their belief in) their own "whiteness."

Review of 'Between the World and Me' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Just to be clear - I am a white, middle aged (plus...) upper middle class heterosexual male with stable childhood and great family. I am, as John Scalzi wrote in his brilliant blog post, playing the game of life on The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is. My single interaction with the police was a weird one when a crazy person tried to attack my car with a baseball bat - I'll be glad to tell you that story over a beer some day. But it was more humorous than dangerous. We have a cop living in our neighborhood and, while my daughters played with his daughters, we didn't have much to do with each other, but it was nice to have the feeling our neighborhood got a little more coverage than the normal one.

All of that is to say that I just can't imagine what life as a …

Review of 'Between the World and Me' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

This book is a chronicle of the mental and emotional changes of a sensitive man living in a black body in America. It's at times poetic and honest about deep emotion, and though most of the time he's addressing his son, the author speaks to the silent observer who takes their white body for granted in the luxury of ignorance. He never uses the term "white privilege," and he's less accusing than James Baldwin, but he welcomes the reader into his head and to see with his eyes.

"I wanted you to see different people living by different rules."

Coates has a complicated relationship with the place that he grew up. He complains that he was in a fight for survival, keeping his body safe, and putting him at the very bottom rung of Maslowe's hierarchy of needs. However, he justifies the very system of violence that he abhors, he …

Review of 'Between the World and Me' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

A short book, but not an easy one.  Purportedly written to his 15-year old son, possibly as a hard-copy version of the talk that every black male teenager gets.  But published.  Which raises the question of who exactly is the book's intended audience.  I felt like a voyeur reading it.   The structure of the book is loose, more stream of consciousness than anything else.  And the vocabulary is hard to follow, with "people who think they are white" turning into "Dreamers" by the end of the book.  

Review of 'Between the World and Me' on Goodreads

5 stars

A letter to a teenage son, of the father's lived experience of growing up to recognize the complex ways that black bodies are valued less to not at all in a world of and for "people who believe they are white". Personal, compelling, and short, definitely reminiscent of Baldwin but more focused on the pain of black loss than the need for white disavowal of our ongoing racist privilege, though that too is in this book's message.

Audiobook read by the author.

Review of 'Between the World and Me' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

When I think of my long struggle to "try and be a writer", my confidence is shattered upon reading such a poetic, insightful, heartfelt piece as this. This is writing — the naked intimacy of it. Even if I cannot fully grasp the primordial fear documented in this book, Coates's excellent writing gives me a peek into a world I cannot — by definition of my class and race — ever truly know.

I cannot know the fear, but I can understand it. And it can move me.

Full review here: chadkohalyk.com/2016/08/28/listening-in-a-short-review-of-between-the-world-and-me/

Review of 'Between the World and Me' on 'LibraryThing'

No rating

 Short, potent, powerful essays addressed to the author's son, explaining how whiteness blinds those who "think they are white" to the fundamental injustice of slavery that the U.S. was built on, contrasted to the "dream" which poisons attempts to come to grips with reality and with the constant fear and risk and distorted masculinity that characterizes the lives of black men in America. I found it difficult and enlightening in large part because it isn't addressed to me, while also being entirely aware of how white readers would read it.

Review of 'Between the World and Me' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

This book started off as though a Noam Chomsky-acolyte had written it, e.g.:

This leads us to another equally important ideal, one that Americans implicitly accept but to which they make no conscious claim. Americans believe in the reality of “race” as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world. Racism—the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them—inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In this way, racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or the Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, a tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as beyond the handiwork of men.



I found it very powerful, that the author negates and questions the muddled concept of "race"; the fact that he has written the book as though it were a letter to …

Review of 'Between the World and Me' on 'LibraryThing'

4 stars

This book started off as though a Noam Chomsky-acolyte had written it, e.g.:

This leads us to another equally important ideal, one that Americans implicitly accept but to which they make no conscious claim. Americans believe in the reality of “race” as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world. Racism—the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them—inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In this way, racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or the Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, a tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as beyond the handiwork of men.



I found it very powerful, that the author negates and questions the muddled concept of "race"; the fact that he has written the book as though it were a letter to …

Review of 'Between the World and Me' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Framed as a letter to his son, it often felt like I was reading it surreptitiously. Ostensibly, it wasn't written for me, but I think actually, it was, and the feeling of being an outsider was intended.

Although his experiences growing up were not mine, they were also not foreign to me. I was never a Dreamer, his term for one sleepwalking through life enraptured by a belief in the American Dream. I had the privilege of believing myself White (a turn of phrase I believe he borrows from James Baldwin) but I was small and bullied both at home and in school, brought up by a family who thought they were different (that is to say, better) than their neighbors. I went through life fearful of my body being destroyed, though with a lot less reason to feel that way than he did.

Still, psychology being the way it …

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