Let me cut to the chase-this book is a must read. Usually when you hear about a book hyped as much as Ta-Nehishi Coates’ Between the World and Me, you’re going to be disappointed. This is the rare exception. Before I even finished the 152 page book, I knew it was the type of work that will outlive all of us, a permanent fixture on bookstore shelves and college syllabi. This book-written in the aftermath of the Ferguson protests and published ahead of schedule after […]
A Different Life in America
A friend of mine introduced me to Ta-Nehisi Coates with The Beautiful Struggle, a book I found both moving and eye-opening. When I started seeing Between the World and Me (2015) on bookshelves, I knew I’d be reading it. The Beautiful Struggle was a memoir of Coates’s life, growing up in the violent streets of Baltimore with a dictatorial father.Between the World and Me covers some of the same ground but in a very different way. This book is an existentialist (according to the NY Times) letter to […]
Black Lives Matter.
This book. Oh, this book. I can’t say enough about it, because it’s timely and one of the most important things ever written. And yet I can’t find what I need to say about it, because there aren’t words enough. I was inspired to read it after seeing faintingviolet’s insightful review, and then when Ta-Nehisi Coates won the National Book Award, I raced to the library. In a nutshell, this is a book about being black in the United States. More specifically, it is about […]
“Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body – it is heritage.”
Another book I have put off reviewing, but let’s dive in. As part of the Read Harder Challenge one of the tasks is reading a book by someone of the opposite sex. I have already read over 40 books written by men this year (which is surprisingly less than half, but I think my romance authors are what tips the scales) and I had kind of decided to wait to claim a book for this particular task until something stood out from the rest. This […]
The Dreamers Need to Shut Up and Listen
As the #Blacklivesmatter and #Alllivesmatter debate wages, I can’t help but think of the line from Animal Farm (that I first read at age 9, thinking it was a story about talking animals like Charlotte’s Web)—“All Animals are equal but some Animals are more equal than others.” What I think the #Alllivesmatter folks don’t get is that it’s precisely because ALL lives matter that the #Blacklivesmatter movement started because clearly, in this country, some lives matter more than others. It is within all this sound […]
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