Between the World and Me in Around the World in 80 Books

Jul 28, 2016 Ryan rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: borrowed, 2016, audiobooks

No.

I don't know what it's like.
I never have known what it's like.
I never WILL know what it's like.

I can drape myself in empathy and sympathy but that is as far as I should ever expect to go. I can preach, and amplify, and support...but I cannot know.

Because I cannot know, I need to listen. I need to ask questions in the quest for understanding, and from a place of humility. I need to listen to the answers...not wait for my turn to talk.

I live in a place that is "a little better", but even here t ...more

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Aug 30, 2020 Colleen Chi-Girl rated it it was amazing

Shelves: bios-memoirs, audiobooks, us-no-amer, education-teaching, anti-racist, self-help, non-fic, chicago-and-illinois, 2020

This relatively short bio was unputdownable. I listened to it on audio, read by the author, Ta-Nehisi Coates, a Black man raised in Baltimore. His life was full of all the tragedy of growing up poor and Black. It includes schools that under appreciated him, with circumstances all along that marginalized him and his family before and after him.

This is his open letter to his young son, and it is direct and draws you into his hopes and his pain. It is so compelling, eye-opening, and we along for ...more

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Nov 03, 2015 Nadine in NY Jones rated it liked it

Shelves: lotsa-buzz, essays, national-book-award-winners

Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage .

this isn't what I was expecting (and I'm not even sure what I was expecting). I'm just a middle class white lady trying my damndest to be intersectional, and I try to read a broad spectrum of books so that my brain can try to be a broad spectrum. But this book wasn't written for me. It was too allegorical, or rhetorical, or something-ical, to speak to me, I think.

I think. I thin ...more

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Jun 24, 2017 Kay rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: biogr-memoir, nonfiction, available-mcpl, book-clubs, current_affairs, audiobooks

Read for "Potluck and Prose" book club meeting of April 2017, which I couldn't attend but wanted to. Decided to read along -- or, rather, listen along to the audiobook read by the author. Thought provoking, but, I felt, at times rather repetitive and with a tendency to over-dramatize or stretch the point. ...more

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Dec 22, 2015 Erica rated it liked it

I liked this book. A wonderful concept and frame and articulation of an important voice today. But I didn't feel it was really in any way new in history or concepts...but perhaps that's not what's needed now. We still need radical action and deep change on very old concepts, of course.

Loc 70: "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 ph ...more

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