In this beautifully written memoir, Ta-Nehisi Coates creates poetry on the page about growing up in and around Baltimore, the son of William Paul Coates, a former Black Panther but now a more scholarly activist and “Conscious Man.”  Though present in all his children’s lives, the senior Coates had seven kids by four women and that creates a complicated extended family for Coates.   He describes a childhood that is a mix of pop culture, “woke” politics, and neighborhood tensions and one that has Coates negotiating […]