Available instantly

Audiobook
$0.00
with membership trial

Hardcover
$12.23

Audio CD
$15.00

Buy used:

$15.00

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime

FREE delivery Thursday, May 29 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35

Or Prime members get FREE delivery Tomorrow, May 25. Order within 6 hrs 13 mins.

Used: Very Good | Details

Sold by Baker's Library

Fulfilled by Amazon

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.

Only 1 left in stock - order soon.

Other sellers on Amazon

New & Used (22) from $7.98 & FREE Shipping

Image Unavailable

Image not available for
Color:

To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the author

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Follow

Between the World and Me Audio CD – Unabridged, September 8, 2015

by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Author, Reader)

43,604 ratings

Part of: One World Essentials (12 books)

Editors' pick Best History

See all formats and editions

National Book AwardWinner, 2015

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • ONE OF OPRAH’S “BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH” • NOW AN HBO ORIGINAL SPECIAL EVENT

Hailed by Toni Morrison as “required reading,” a bold and personal literary exploration of America’s racial history by “the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race” (Rolling Stone)

NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL BOOKS OF THE DECADE BY CNN • NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • O: The Oprah Magazine • The Washington Post • People • Entertainment Weekly • Vogue • Los Angeles Times • San Francisco Chronicle • Chicago Tribune • New York • Newsday • Library Journal • Publishers Weekly

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 the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates. The language of Between the World and Me, like Coates’s journey, is visceral, eloquent, and beautifully redemptive. And its examination of the hazards and hopes of black male life is as profound as it is revelatory. This is required reading.”—Toni Morrison

“Powerful and passionate . . . profoundly moving . . . a searing meditation on what it means to be black in America today.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Really powerful and emotional.”—John Legend, The Wall Street Journal

“Extraordinary . . . [Coates] writes an impassioned letter to his teenage son—a letter both loving and full of a parent’s dread—counseling 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.”—David Remnick, The New Yorker

“Brilliant . . . a riveting meditation on the state of race in America . . . [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.”—The Washington Post

“An eloquent blend of history, reportage, and memoir written in the tradition of James Baldwin with echoes of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man . . . It is less a typical memoir of a particular time and place than an autobiography of the black body in America. . . . Coates writes with tenderness, especially of his wife, child, and extended family, and with frankness. . . . Coates’s success, in this book and elsewhere, is due to his lucidity and innate dignity, his respect for himself and for others. He refuses to preach or talk down to white readers or to plead for acceptance: He never wonders why we just can’t all get along. He knows government policies make getting along near impossible.”—The Boston Globe

“For someone who proudly calls himself an atheist, Coates gives us a whole lot of ‘Can I get an amen?’ in this slim and essential volume of familial joy and rigorous struggle. . . . [He] has become the most sought-after public intellectual on the issue of race in America, with good reason. Between the World and Me . . . is at once a magnification and a distillation of our existence as black people in a country we were not meant to survive. It is a straight tribute to our strength, endurance and grace. . . . [Coates] speaks resolutely and vividly to all of black America.”—Los Angeles Times

“A crucial book during this moment of generational awakening.”—The New Yorker

“A work that’s both titanic and timely, Between the World and Me is the latest essential reading in America’s social canon.”—Entertainment Weekly

“Coates delivers a beautiful lyrical call for consciousness in the face of racial discrimination in America. . . . Between the World and Me is in the same mode of The Fire Next Time; it is a book designed to wake you up. . . . An exhortation against blindness.”—The Guardian

“Coates has crafted a deeply moving and poignant letter to his own son. . . . [His] book is a compelling mix of history, analysis and memoir. Between the World and Me is a much-needed artifact to document the times we are living in [from] one of the leading public intellectuals of our generation. . . . The experience of having a sage elder speak directly to you in such lyrical, gorgeous prose—language bursting with the revelatory thought and love of black life—is a beautiful thing.”—The Root

“Rife with love, sadness, anger and struggle, Between the World and Me charts a path through the American gauntlet for both the black child who will inevitably walk the world alone and for the black parent who must let that child walk away.”—Newsday

“Poignant, revelatory and exceedingly wise, Between the World and Me is an essential clarion call to our collective conscience. We ignore it at our own peril.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“Masterfully written . . . powerful storytelling.”—New York Post

“One of the most riveting and heartfelt books to appear in some time . . . The book achieves a level of clarity and eloquence reminiscent of Ralph Ellison’s classic Invisible Man. . . . The perspective [Coates] brings to American life is one that no responsible citizen or serious scholar can safely ignore.”—Foreign Affairs

“Urgent, lyrical, and devastating in its precision, Coates has penned a new classic of our time.”—Vogue

“Powerful.”—The Economist

“A work of rare beauty and revelatory honesty . . . Between the World and Me is a love letter written in a moral emergency, one that Coates exposes with the precision of an autopsy and the force of an exorcism. . . . Coates is frequently lauded as one of America’s most important writers on the subject of race today, but this in fact undersells him: Coates is one of America’s most important writers on the subject of America today. . . . [He’s] a polymath whose breadth of knowledge on matters ranging from literature to pop culture to French philosophy to the Civil War bleeds through every page of his book, distilled into profound moments of discovery, immensely erudite but never showy.”—Slate

“The most important book I’ve read in years . . . an illuminating, edifying, educational, inspiring experience.”—Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center

“It’s an indescribably enlightening, enraging, important document about being black in America today. Coates is perhaps the best we have, and this book is perhaps the best he’s ever been.”—Deadspin

“Vital reading at this moment in America.”—U.S. News & World Report

“[Coates] has crafted a highly provocative, thoughtfully presented, and beautifully written narrative. . . . Much of what Coates writes may be difficult for a majority of Americans to process, but that’s the incisive wisdom of it. Read it, think about it, take a deep breath and read it again. The spirit of James Baldwin lives within its pages.”—The Christian Science Monitor

“Part memoir, part diary, and wholly necessary, it is precisely the document this country needs right now.”—New Republic

“A moving testament to what it means to be black and an American in our troubled age . . . Between the World and Me feels of-the-moment, but like James Baldwin’s celebrated 1963 treatise The Fire Next Time, it stands to become a classic on the subject of race in America.”—The Seattle Times

“Riveting . . . Coates delivers a fiery soliloquy dissecting the tradition of the erasure of African-Americans beginning with the deeply personal.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“[Between the World and Me] is not a Pollyanna, coming-of-age memoir about how idyllic life was growing up in America. It is raw. It is searing. . . . [It’s] a book that should be read and shared by everyone, as it is a story that painfully and honestly explores the age-old question of what it means to grow up black and male in America.”—The Baltimore Sun

“A searing indictment of America’s legacy of violence, institutional and otherwise, against blacks.”—Chicago Tribune

“I know that this book is addressed to the author’s son, and by obvious analogy to all boys and young men of color as they pass, inexorably, into harm’s way. I hope that I will be forgiven, then, for feeling that 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, to acknowledge the limits of our power to protect our children from harm and, hardest of all, to see how the burden of our need to protect becomes a burden on them, one that we must, sooner or later, have the wisdom and the awful courage to surrender.”—Michael Chabon

“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 four hundred 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. Between the World and Me is an instant classic and a gift to us all.”—Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns

About the Author

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent for The Atlantic. His book Between the World and Me won the National Book Award in 2015. Coates is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. He lives in New York City with his wife and son.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I.

. . . we sprawl in gray chains in a place full of winters when what we want is the sun

Amira Baraka, “Ka Ba”

Son,

Last Sunday the host of a popular news show asked me what it meant to lose my body. The host was broadcasting from Washington, D.C., and I was seated in a remote studio on the far west side of Manhattan. A satellite closed the miles between us, but no machinery could close the gap between her world and the world for which I had been summoned to speak. When the host asked me about my body, her face faded from the screen, and was replaced by a scroll of words, written by me earlier that week.

The host read these words for the audience, and when she finished she turned to the subject of my body, although she did not mention it specifically. But by now I am accustomed to intelligent people asking about the condition of my body without realizing the nature of their request. Specifically, the host wished to know why I felt that white America’s progress, or rather the progress of those Americans who believe that they are white, was built on looting and violence. Hearing this, I felt an old and indistinct sadness well up in me. The answer to this question is the record of the believers themselves. The answer is American history.

There is nothing extreme in this statement. Americans deify democracy in a way that allows for a dim awareness that they have, from time to time, stood in defiance of their God. But democracy is a forgiving God and America’s heresies—torture, theft, enslavement—are so common among individuals and nations that none can declare themselves immune. In fact, Americans, in a real sense, have never betrayed their God. When Abraham Lincoln declared, in 1863, that the battle of Gettysburg must ensure “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” he was not merely being aspirational; at the onset of the Civil War, the United States of America had one of the highest rates of suffrage in the world. The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant “government of the people” but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term “people” to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me. Thus America’s problem is not its betrayal of “government of the people,” but the means by which “the people” acquired their names.

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.

But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming “the people” has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible—this is the new idea at the heart of this new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.

These new people are, like us, a modern invention. But unlike us, their new name has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power. The new people were something else before they were white—Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish—and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again. Perhaps they will truly become American and create a nobler basis for their myths. I cannot call it. As for now, it must be said that the process of washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the belief in being white, was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies.

The new people are not original in this. Perhaps there has been, at some point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to discover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal. America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and the terrorists, despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization. One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen’s claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard. This is difficult because there exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much. And it is so easy to look away, to live with the fruits of our history and to ignore the great evil done in all of our names. But you and I have never truly had that luxury. I think you know.

I write you in your fifteenth year. I am writing you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, that John Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department store. And you have seen men in uniform drive by and murder Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old child whom they were oath-bound to protect. And you have seen men in the same uniforms pummel Marlene Pinnock, someone’s grandmother, on the side of a road. And you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy. Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed. Resent the people trying to entrap your body and it can be destroyed. Turn into a dark stairwell and your body can be destroyed. The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations. All of this is common to black people. And all of this is old for black people. No one is held responsible.

There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.

That Sunday, with that host, on that news show, I tried to explain this as best I could within the time allotted. But at the end of the segment, the host flashed a widely shared picture of an eleven-year-old black boy tearfully hugging a white police officer. Then she asked me about “hope.” And I knew then that I had failed. And I remembered that I had expected to fail. And I wondered again at the indistinct sadness welling up in me. Why exactly was I sad? I came out of the studio and walked for a while. It was a calm December day. Families, believing themselves white, were out on the streets. Infants, raised to be white, were bundled in strollers. And I was sad for these people, much as I was sad for the host and sad for all the people out there watching and reveling in a specious hope. I realized then why I was sad. When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream. I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is treehouses and the Cub Scouts. The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies. And knowing this, knowing that the Dream persists by warring with the known world, I was sad for the host, I was sad for all those families, I was sad for my country, but above all, in that moment, I was sad for you.

That was the week you learned that the killers of Michael Brown would go free. The men who had left his body in the street like some awesome declaration of their inviolable power would never be punished. It was not my expectation that anyone would ever be punished. But you were young and still believed. You stayed up till 11 p.m. that night, waiting for the announcement of an indictment, and when instead it was announced that there was none you said, “I’ve got to go,” and you went into your room, and I heard you crying. I came in five minutes after, and I didn’t hug you, and I didn’t comfort you, because I thought it would be wrong to comfort you. I did not tell you that it would be okay, because I have never believed it would be okay. What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it. I tell you now that the question of how one should live within a black body, within a country lost in the Dream, is the question of my life, and the pursuit of this question, I have found, ultimately answers itself.

This must seem strange to you. We live in a “goal-oriented” era. Our media vocabulary is full of hot takes, big ideas, and grand theories of everything. But some time ago I rejected magic in all its forms. This rejection was a gift from your grandparents, who never tried to console me with ideas of an afterlife and were skeptical of preordained American glory. In accepting both the chaos of history and the fact of my total end, I was freed to truly consider how I wished to live—specifically, how do I live free in this black body? It is a profound question because America understands itself as God’s handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men. I have asked the question through my reading and writings, through the music of my youth, through arguments with your grandfather, with your mother, your aunt Janai, your uncle Ben. I have searched for answers in nationalist myth, in classrooms, out on the streets, and on other continents. The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and girded me against the sheer terror of disembodiment.

And I am afraid. I feel the fear most acutely whenever you leave me. But I was afraid long before you, and in this I was unoriginal. When I was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid. I had seen this fear all my young life, though I had not always recognized it as such.

It was always right in front of me. The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my neighborhood, in their large rings and medallions, their big puffy coats and full-length fur-collared leathers, which was their armor against their world. They would stand on the corner of Gwynn Oak and Liberty, or Cold Spring and Park Heights, or outside Mondawmin Mall, with their hands dipped in Russell sweats. I think back on those boys now and all I see is fear, and all I see is them girding themselves against the ghosts of the bad old days when the Mississippi mob gathered ’round their grandfathers so that the branches of the black body might be torched, then cut away. The fear lived on in their practiced bop, their slouching denim, their big T‑shirts, the calculated angle of their baseball caps, a catalog of behaviors and garments enlisted to inspire the belief that these boys were in firm possession of everything they desired.

I saw it in their customs of war. I was no older than five, sitting out on the front steps of my home on Woodbrook Avenue, watching two shirtless boys circle each other close and buck shoulders. From then on, I knew that there was a ritual to a street fight, bylaws and codes that, in their very need, attested to all the vulnerability of the black teenage bodies.

I heard the fear in the first music I ever knew, the music that pumped from boom boxes full of grand boast and bluster. The boys who stood out on Garrison and Liberty up on Park Heights loved this music because it told them, against all evidence and odds, that they were masters of their own lives, their own streets, and their own bodies. I saw it in the girls, in their loud laughter, in their gilded bamboo earrings that announced their names thrice over. And I saw it in their brutal language and hard gaze, how they would cut you with their eyes and destroy you with their words for the sin of playing too much. “Keep my name out your mouth,” they would say. I would watch them after school, how they squared off like boxers, vaselined up, earrings off, Reeboks on, and leaped at each other.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House Audio
Publication date ‏ : ‎ September 8, 2015
Edition ‏ : ‎ Unabridged
Language ‏ : ‎ English
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0451482212
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0451482211
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.04 x 0.5 x 5.85 inches
Part of series ‏ : ‎ One World Essentials

Best Sellers Rank: #1,226,506 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #9 in Black & African American Biographies
- #49 in United States Biographies
- #260 in Politics & Social Sciences (Books)

Customer Reviews:
43,604 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Videos

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload your video

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is an award-winning author and journalist. His books include The Water Dancer and The Message. He is currently a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and the Sterling Brown Endowed Chair in the English department at Howard University.

Customer reviews

43,604 global ratings

How customer reviews and ratings work

Review this product

Write a customer review

Customers say

Customers find the book compelling and beautifully written, with words that feel like poetry. They appreciate how it vividly conveys emotions and experiences, and one customer describes it as a hope-inspiring read. Moreover, the book is honest and based in truth, with one review noting it provides the best understanding of racism in the country. However, the pacing receives mixed reactions, with some finding it riveting while others describe it as repetitive and infuriating.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

Select to learn more

Readability Thought provoking Writing quality Emotional content Honesty Pacing Racism Rambling content

1,954 customers mention "Readability"1,816 positive138 negative

Customers find the book compelling and a pleasure to read, with one customer describing it as essential reading for our times.

"...Normally I would give it my special rating for an exceptional work, 6-stars. However, I did have some problems with it...." Read more

"...the author’s honesty in his growing racial understanding, the book is poignant, insightful, and beautifully written...." Read more

"...This is at once a beautiful, touching, moving and profoundly insightful book...." Read more

"...Similar to The Fire Next Time, Between The World and Me is substantively exquisite, overflowing with insights about the embodied existence of..." Read more

1,488 customers mention "Thought provoking"1,419 positive69 negative

Customers find the book thought-provoking, describing it as incredibly insightful and eye-opening, with one customer noting it provides a great framework to view the subject matter.

"...Now if you ask for my 2 cents worth, Atheism served as a masterful tool to help you sculpture the truth of America's heinous atrocities towards..." Read more

"...This is an important book that ought to be read with an open heart willing to listen and believe. A" Read more

"...in one swiftly deft sweep of elegant prose, questions about racial identity in America that have puzzled me since I realized that I was &#..." Read more

"...provocative, well-spoken, intellectually sound, and speaks from a world that I can only see from afar." So when the show host said his name, I..." Read more

1,361 customers mention "Writing quality"1,241 positive120 negative

Customers praise the writing style of the book, noting its eloquent and poetic nature, with one customer describing it as a literary masterpiece.

"...His writing style is hauntingly poetic and sobering...." Read more

"...His is a staccato writing style; the “takeaways” of a 1000 page book...." Read more

"...racial understanding, the book is poignant, insightful, and beautifully written...." Read more

"...It answered, in one swiftly deft sweep of elegant prose, questions about racial identity in America that have puzzled me since I realized that I was..." Read more

694 customers mention "Emotional content"553 positive141 negative

Customers appreciate the book's emotional content, noting how it vividly conveys emotions and personal experiences, and helps readers empathize with the author's perspective.

"...His writing style is hauntingly poetic and sobering...." Read more

"...freedom from fear of physical vulnerability and pain, free from fear of the the system, and free from fear of economic want among other freedoms...." Read more

"...His eulogy for Jones is haunting and beautiful. Accountability? There never is any. “..." Read more

"...to try to articulate points that Coates draws beautifully and with deep empathy...." Read more

230 customers mention "Honesty"218 positive12 negative

Customers appreciate the book's honesty, describing it as a raw and forthright account based in truth.

"...Secondly, Coates is incredibly honest; there’s a “calling it like I see it” quality here that is refreshing...." Read more

"...Between the World and Me was beautiful, real, and raw. The writing truly took my breath away. It was lyrical. It made me feel. It was a gut punch...." Read more

"...He was smart, personable and kind-hearted. His mother, Mable Jones, had followed the “Dream”...." Read more

"...One is that race is the child of racism, not the father. So true, so simple, so profound, and so completely opposite of what our culture teaches us..." Read more

98 customers mention "Pacing"94 positive4 negative

Customers find the pacing of the book riveting and wonderfully moving, with one customer noting it flows like a fun essay.

"...This is at once a beautiful, touching, moving and profoundly insightful book...." Read more

"...First, there are some incredibly tender, moving moments in Coates’ addresses to his son...." Read more

""Between the World and Me" is one of the most moving and beautifully written books I've ever read...." Read more

"...I found the book moving, superbly word crafted, gut wrenching and thought provoking about a social cultural, social and human reality in the U.S...." Read more

106 customers mention "Racism"67 positive39 negative

Customers have mixed views on the book's treatment of racism, with some praising it as the best understanding of racial issues in the country and providing great insights into modern-day oppression, while others find it problematic and argue that the problems of racism are hopeless.

"...Two lines in the book really jumped out at me. One is that race is the child of racism, not the father...." Read more

"...The wound of racism is too fresh; the sharpness of the pain captures his senses and arrests his imagination...." Read more

"...It is an insight into how humans behave when they hear the message every day that they, unlike their fellow light-skinned citizens, are likely to be..." Read more

"...I don't care what race you are, please read this book. This book touched on race and the author's personal experience as a Black man in America...." Read more

94 customers mention "Rambling content"16 positive78 negative

Customers find the content of the book repetitive and frustrating, describing it as an incoherent rant that is overwhelming at times.

"...; your stories within a story reach me as brilliantly, though brutally self-consistent in that they are anchored and rooted in one of the most, if..." Read more

"...He has written a book that, with its hateful, downright nasty tone, unsupported arguments, and at times even outright racism, will wind up doing..." Read more

"opening thoughts about this book and it’s themes are that it is very repetitive...." Read more

"...Crammed with too much willful metaphors and rhetorical expressions, it's like a huge chocolate cake too sugary and full of fat to consume...." Read more

Reviews with images

See all photos

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews. Please reload the page.

Amy Breedlove
Dreamers and Strugglers
Reviewed in the United States on July 24, 2015
Verified Purchase

Every new month brings with it a flood of new names forever lost to this life, here and now. Trayvon, Brown, Garner, Tamir, Emanuel 9, and Sandra, with innumerable names before and many more to come. True tragedies. Unspeakable evils.

Those who bear the inhumane weight of racism seemingly burst with grief constantly. How can a human endure such relentless onslaught? The truth of being a person of color in America, is that this country was not built for all. This country was, though, built on the backs and bodies of black lives.
"Whites" that benefit from white supremacy and privilege don't want to understand the insidious cost of an empire with a history (and ongoing reality) that diminishes and devalues non-"white" persons and cultures.

I've read "Between the World and Me" in the wake of Sandra Bland's murder. "Suicide!" some will vehemently counter. No, Sandra was murdered.

I will never know the struggle to survive that a woman, a black woman, has to daily endure, moment by moment, her whole life long. Being non-white, non-male, non-evangelical, non-heterosexual, and non-abled bodied is a constant struggle in the empire of America.

Sandra Bland never had a day of her brief life where she did not have to struggle against a history and future always set against her. I'm not saying I know what precisely ended Sandra's life, the specific mechanism of her death, but I do know that she was murdered. All black lives are daily being murdered by the "white" empire of America.

Race is a construct. It is true that we, whatever shade of hue, all are human. But, some constructs of race are fuel and plunder for the militant machinery of empire.

Coates explains,

"Plunder has matured into habit and addiction [for "white" America]; the people who could author the mechanized death of our ghettos, the mass rape of private prisons, then engineer their own forgetting, must inevitably plunder much more. This is not a belief in prophecy but in the seductiveness of cheap gasoline."

Coates also contrasts dreamers and strugglers.

Dreamers want to be "white". The dream of equality is really a desire to be "white"; that is, to benefit from this empire, instead of being churned by empire, one has to be white. Coates does not quite say it like this. This is my interpretation of his term, "dreamers".

Strugglers have awaken from the dream, and strugglers just want to live their brief lives, they only desire to be human. Strugglers are under no dreamy illusion that they will ever fully be equal in this empire. The empire of America is not interested in or built for equality. Empire is built for and by domination. Again, this is my interpretation of Coates, and not his words.

Coates writes (and lives) with an immediacy of the here and now. His writing style is hauntingly poetic and sobering. He doesn't use the phrase, "black lives matter," but he is clear that his physical body matters. His son's life matters. His book is a memoir for his son's benefit-- a matter of life and death.
Coates' own awakening from the temptation to dream, and to succumb to illusion, is born out of a grounding revelation that his life, his physical body, is all he gets.

Coates explains:
"I have no God to hold me up. And I believe that when they shatter the body they shatter everything, and I knew that all of us—Christians, Muslims, atheists—lived in this fear of this truth. Disembodiment is a kind of terrorism, and the threat of it alters the orbit of all our lives and, like terrorism, this distortion is intentional."

Practically too, Coates exposes some often touted anthems of the white empire of America:

“'Black-on-black crime' is jargon, violence to language, which vanishes the men who engineered the covenants, who fixed the loans, who planned the projects, who built the streets and sold red ink by the barrel. And this should not surprise us. The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days, we must invariably return."
Some further contextual reflections as I read "Between the World and Me":
White privilege serves white supremacy, the social construct [of my] "whiteness" hides in the cloak of normalcy, "it is what it is", left unquestioned & unexposed for what it really is, a sinister systemic evil.
Someone recently asked me "What if what happened to Sandra Bland was about a 'black' officer and a 'white' civilian?"

Police brutality is perpetrated and experienced by various persons of all constructs of race. But, what happened to Sandra is not as frequent of an experience for "white" persons. Officers operating from a position and system of white supremacy (even officers of color) are extra cruel, historically speaking, toward persons of color.

Consider that our present moment in history is not far removed from slavery followed by segregation, then by Jim Crow, then by the unsettled civil rights struggle, and then still yet by an uphill climb for minorities. An African American person in his forties might only be two to three generations from slavery.
This country, with all of its history, is only 4-5 generations old (depending on how one accounts for a generational span of time), that's a pretty young country. And, if an unfolding history ebbs and flows, like a pendulum swinging forward and then slightly backwards, then true progress is slow.

So, to answer the hypothetical (fantasy) question (switching the race roles of the Sandra Bland injustice), considering that African Americans are about 13% of USA population, and that black officers are a lesser percentage of the USA police force, then the frequency of "black" officer violence against "white" civilians is far less frequent then the more frequent way around. Plus, history has largely not been kind to minorities in this country.

Back to Coates, even as a person of faith (clergy), I too sense in my own self that perhaps this physical life is all we get. And, to survive is to struggle; to know any degree of joy is a struggle.

And, if one is a person of color (non- "white"), then the history and ongoing reality of the American empire will always be against them.

Read more

29 people found this helpful

Helpful

Report
Joseph F. Towns III
Truth vs. Proof
Reviewed in the United States on August 7, 2015
Verified Purchase
Truth vs. Proof

Dear Ta-Nehisi Coates,

Allow me to experiment with a literary device by writing a review of your book, "Between the World and Me," just as a letter or an ordinary email. Once upon a time near the beginning of the 19th century, mathematicians began seeing mathematics itself as a collection of self-consistent stories until Kurt Gogel comes along in 1931 with his Incompleteness Theorems, injecting uncertainty at the very heart of mathematics and proving not all of the stories in mathematics are self-consistent; nor, are without contradictions; and that there are true statements in mathematics which mathematicians will not be able to prove.

In "Between the World and Me" your stories within a story reach me as brilliantly, though brutally self-consistent in that they are anchored and rooted in one of the most, if not the most inhumane systems known to man: The American system of chattel slavery. I celebrated the fact that yours is a work of nonfiction but wept since, I dare say, most of your 'Dreamers' would simply apologise for their ignorance, or would be programmed to read it as fiction, at best faction, a risky presumption in these days of Mark Bauerlein's "The Dumbest Generation," that many would even read a difference between fiction and faction at all.

Speaking of non-fiction, tending to your blackness, as your son surely knows by now, requires full consciousness 24/7, unlike ministering a garden. Giving credit to your 'Dreamers,' Black men of an African Diaspora are targeted around the world. In a remote Swiss village - higher up from Leukerbad, the village upon which James Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village” is based -
my traveling companion -- Maximilian Anton Lindbuchler known variously as Afro German or a Brown baby and I -- were asked by village elders to present our tails. The crispness of our German, even in dialect, put paid to their titillated excitement and expectation of a freak show.

Your literal focus on the destruction of the black body was at once profoundly real and terrifying. Who would have predicted this 21st century face of Jim Crow-ism and virtual re-enslavement in which American police departments, the new slave overseers, so freely exercise their endowed authority -- as they always have -- to destroy black bodies. If the greatest reward of this confrontation with naked American brutality is that it has freed you from ghosts, then, possibly, the spirits of Emmett Louis Till and countless other spirits have been set free, not to mention the spirit of Amiri Baraka, the poet, who, when he eulogized James Baldwin, said that Baldwin's spirit was the only truth which keeps us sane.

Now if you ask for my 2 cents worth, Atheism served as a masterful tool to help you sculpture the truth of America's heinous atrocities towards black people into some sort of relief, like the massive founding fathers at Mt. Rushmore. Notwithstanding, though it would appear Martin Luther King, Jr. with his Dreams and Barack Obama, an icon of Hope, suffer the God delusion, one wonders whether Werner Heisenberg, a founder of quantum theory, and a Nobel Prize winner in Physics, was deluded when he wrote, “The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.” I expect both Malcolm and Baldwin would be happy with this insight, but especially Baldwin since Baldwin is so beautifully driven by love.

In writing this email, I, too, thought I'd do what I thought Jimmy might do, and I, too, am over-the-moon you've received such a literary endorsement from the esteemed Nobel laureate, Tony Morrison. Your syntax and your uncompromising approach to the truth of American history is what makes you, in my view, Baldwin-nesque. It doesn't surprise me one iota that you may have left your home shores in a maelstrom of controversy generated by what I call America's backstabbing, throat-cutting, jaw breaking polemical insanity -- a violence in the use of language that is beyond measure, black and white.

My sons say you're already in Paris, on the other side of what I now, through reading call, the Black Atlantic because of the number of Black bodies deposited in her depths. I have stories to share about meeting Jimmy at the famed Cafe Le Deux Magots and about meeting Malcolm X in Cairo upon his return from Mecca, not Howard. :) I've encountered several young African American ‘wanna be’ writers who sat at Baldwin's feet in Paris and whom Baldwin wasted no mantra time in saying, "If you wish to write, you must read. Full Stop." Happily, you were passed the mantle, but may I add, it would be unwise for others to expect you to be James Baldwin. Only James Baldwin can be James Baldwin.

I'm now seriously reading in Quantum Physics to learn of the elusive subatomic particle, the Higgs boson, which has come to be known as, 'the God particle,’ and to explore whether there is a quantum consciousness that connects us all. I reckon I’m in search of proof for another likely truth. Like you Ta-Nehisi, I grew up knowing only black folk, and I think I owe Benjamin Elijah Mays, for whom I served as a tour guide at the Pyramids of Giza, a more rigorous, cogent, proof-like explanation for why so many prepared for an afterlife. Besides, it was Mays would encouraged me to make the world my country and mankind, my countryman.

Should you feel a need to be surrounded by the sounds of English, then jump on the Euro Star at Gare du Nord. I can meet you at St. Pancreas, London, but give us some notice as I'd like for you to meet my sons and my friend, William Jones, whom I call: the Professor Emeritus of Blackness.

bon Après-Midi,

Joseph F Towns III.

Read more

5 people found this helpful

Helpful

Report

Top reviews from other countries

Translate all reviews to English

matmer
Read it if you aren't an African American
Reviewed in the United Arab Emirates on July 6, 2019
Verified Purchase

It is a view into another world and culture. When you reside or grow up in cosmopolitan cultures like those of the Arabian Gulf, it is hard to know the kinds of lifelong fears and doubts that many African Americans experience from a young age.

Read more
Report
Oparazzo
Vom Krebs im Körper Amerikas
Reviewed in Germany on February 21, 2016
Verified Purchase
Selten habe ich zwei so unterschiedliche Bücher mit ähnlichem Thema und ähnlicher Botschaft gelesen wie diese beiden: Bryan Stevensons "Mercy" und Ta-Nehisi Coates' "Between the World and Me". Auf der einen Seite der Anwalt Stevenson, der stets nachdrücklich, aber mit äußerster Vorsicht gegen die Willkür von Polizei und Justiz ankämpft, mit dem Wohl seiner Klienten im Hinterkopf, was ihn auch bei seinen öffentlichen Auftritten immer verbindlich bleiben lässt, auf der anderen der Journalist und Autor Coates, der nichts zu verlieren zu haben scheint und dessen Buch eine bitterböse Anklage ist gegen eine Gesellschaft, die nicht realisiert, dass die Zerstörungen von 250 Jahren Sklaverei nach wie vor als Krebsgeschwür in ihr wuchern, oft deutlich sichtbar, aber oft auch gut verborgen.

Es sind ja nicht nur die ungesühnten Morde, die weiße (und schwarze!) Polizisten an sich zur falschen Zeit am falschen Ort befindlichen Schwarzen begehen, sondern auch die kleinen Erniedrigungen des täglichen Lebens, bei denen wieder und wieder zum Ausdruck kommt, wie fest und oft unbewusst in "denen, die meinen, dass sie weiß sind" der Glaube an eine angeborene, naturgegebene Überlegenheit verankert ist.

Geschrieben als offener Brief an den Sohn und gedacht als offener Brief an die Nation, ist "Between the World and Me" ein mehr oder weniger unsortierter Ausbruch, eine wilde Mischung aus Erinnerungen, Einsichten, Analysen, Warnungen, Forderungen und Hoffnungen - nein, Hoffnungen eher nicht: sein Fazit ist zutiefst pessimistisch, und das Unvermögen Amerikas, seine Probleme zu erkennen und daraus Konsequenzen zu ziehen, gibt ihm dazu reichlich Futter.

Und wenn wir Europäer meinen, wir wären so viel besser als die Amis und könnten uns geschichtsbewusstseinsmäßig entspannt zurücklehnen: Die Folgen von Hunderten Jahren Kolonialismus kriegen wir gerade um die Ohren gehauen. Und wes Geistes Kinder viele von uns auch heute noch sind, haben die Clausnitzer und Bautzener Mobs gerade in diesen Tagen wieder deutlich klargemacht. Dabei könnten wir im Umgang mit den Flüchtlingen zeigen, was wir aus dem Dritten Reich gelernt haben, aber das will in bedenklich viele Köpfe nicht rein.

Read more
Report
Translate review to English
Kinky Kid
Hermoso. triste y lleno de rabia, una lectura obligatoria
Reviewed in Mexico on December 30, 2021
Verified Purchase
Doloroso y triste, pero al mismo tiempo hermoso, en esta carta hacia su propio hijo, Coates analiza la situación racial de Estados Unidos desde un enfoque muy personal. El libro escrito de manera magistral te hace sentir la rabia sobre las injusticias vividas por los afroamericanos solo por el color de la piel. Recomendadisima.

Read more
Report
Translate review to English
E.M.
I liked that line a lot
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 20, 2017
Verified Purchase
Coates writes three long letters to his son. In fact, they are so long that I found it difficult to remember they were actually written for his son. They come across as an out-spilling of the author’s own journey as a black man in America and his quest for understanding of the emotions, violence and policies that have come his way and the way of the black community at large.

The book gives us Coates’ honest thoughts on many important issues – on race, racism, poverty, deprivation, privilege and its abuse, police brutality. He documents his own personal experiences. He tells us of the experience of his friends and family. We see detail and pain and suffering.

Above all, Coates is a student of life (he was taught to inspect reality and find his own truths by his mother). He is an observer and someone who wishes to plunge the depths. He has insights. He has worked hard to understand how he feels as a black man in a black skin.

He wishes that more progress had been made so that the advice he could give to his son would be more positive - that the issues he struggled with growing up would be less present today. That is not the case. There is little light on the horizon, not none at all, just very little. There has been very little progress since the days of slavery.

Coates explains the pervasive fear he has always experienced for his own body – that at any moment his life could be taken on the streets. When his son was born he felt the same terror for his own child.

He discovered the beauty of black heritage, so absent in the media and schools. This was a discovery he made at Howard University, where the diverse black fraternity was alive with debate and dynamism and talent.

He became a reporter and said, “…the softness that once made me a target now compelled people to trust me with their stories…”. I liked that line a lot.

He tells us “…for 250 years black people were born into chains…”

“…transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold” – the founding wealth of America

“…the truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear….”

I resonated with much of what Coates had to say. It’s a timely piece, sobering and brutally honest.

Coates himself says that he has struggled with expressing love and softness to his son (my words) because he has been too terrorized by his own inability to secure the safety of his son on the streets, such that, every moment of life, he is fearful of loss and tragedy. This was the powerful lesson I took away from this book. The flip side, in terms of the writing, is that I had expected more warmth and a more personal nature to the letters. As I was reading, I rather felt that the author was speaking directly to the reader. This was not negative, in fact it was powerful, but it was not the expectation raised by the book blurb.

Footnote
In terms of presentation, I have to say that I think the publisher would have been better to split the three letters into smaller sections, to give the reader time to breathe. Do not let this put you off!

As I said, a timely piece, sobering and brutally honest

Read more

2 people found this helpful
Report
Maria do Carmo Ramos dos Santos
Coates
Reviewed in Brazil on May 10, 2025
Verified Purchase
Excelente

Read more
Report

See more reviews

Follow the author

Between the World and Me Audio CD – Unabridged, September 8, 2015

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Editorial Reviews

Review

About the Author

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Product details

Videos

About the author

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Customer reviews

Review this product

Customers say

Select to learn more

Images in this review

Reviews with images

Essential reading for anyone who wants to learn about racism in USA and worldwide

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews. Please reload the page.

5.0 out of 5 stars Dreamers and Strugglers

5.0 out of 5 stars Truth vs. Proof

Top reviews from other countries

5.0 out of 5 stars Read it if you aren't an African American

5.0 out of 5 stars Vom Krebs im Körper Amerikas

5.0 out of 5 stars Hermoso. triste y lleno de rabia, una lectura obligatoria

5.0 out of 5 stars I liked that line a lot

5.0 out of 5 stars Coates

Dreamers and Strugglers

Truth vs. Proof

Read it if you aren't an African American

Vom Krebs im Körper Amerikas

Hermoso. triste y lleno de rabia, una lectura obligatoria

I liked that line a lot

Coates