The Message [B1488]

2024 HCDJ 1st edition. #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER The renowned author of Between the World and Me journeys to three resonant sites of conflict to explore how the stories we tell-and the ones we don't-shape our realities. "Ta-Nehisi Coates always writes with a purpose. . . . These pilgrimages, for him, help ground his powerful writing about race."-Associated Press. "Coates exhorts readers, including students, parents, educators, and journalists, to challenge conventional narratives that can be used to justify ethnic cleansing or camouflage racist policing. Brilliant and timely."-Booklist. In the first of the book's three intertwining essays, Coates, on his first trip to Africa, finds himself in two places at once: in Dakar, a modern city in Senegal, and in a mythic kingdom in his mind. Then he takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on his own book's banning, but also explores the larger backlash to the nation's "racial reckoning" of 2020 and the deeply rooted American mythology so visible in that city-a capital of the Confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares. Finally, in the book's longest section, Coates travels to Palestine, where he sees with devastating clarity how easily we are misled by nationalist narratives, and the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life on the ground. Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country's most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world-and our own souls-and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.

From recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "Thought provoking and important. This man went to visit a country and admitted his ignorance and asked for absolution through educating the rest of us as to what he saw. And what he saw is something we should all open our eyes to."; "This is Coates inviting us into his process of critical thinking; of connecting deeply to humanity and then slowly allowing those insights to inform how he sees the world. Coates' writing and thinking here is very open--no concrete solutions necessarily but instead we see him exploring the relationship between his tradition, his lived experience, and his writing. Razor sharp, compassionate and deeply thought provoking."; "Amazing account and thought piece from a fantastic writer on topics of race, apartheid, history, politics, and just being human in a complex and unfair world. Very powerful."; "Brilliant and heartbreaking. Ta-Nehisi Coates says he hopes his words haunt his readers-that his message is remembered well after it's been read. Consider me haunted."