From the Bookshelf of Constant Reader…

Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Start date: October 15, 2021

Finish date: November 1, 2021

Discussion: Reading List

Discussion leader: Joan

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Reading List

* The Schedule for July through Dec. 2025
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What Members Thought

Dec 19, 2015 Ken rated it really liked it

Shelves: finished-in-2015, nonfiction

In recovery mode from too much Christmas Eve food, I finished this short book/long letter written as a screed of warning from Dad (Ta-Nehesi Coates) to his son. Much has been written about this book already, so I'll just add that his indictment of America struck a chord that should be struck. It looks at race in ways White America would never think to look at it.

The book is relentlessly physical. Coates repeatedly refers to blacks as "bodies," creating an apt metaphor for how blacks' bodies wer ...more

41 likes · Like · see review

Oct 13, 2015 Linda rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: hardback, chcpl, 2015

I borrowed this book from the library but I need to own a copy. I've already told my son he should read it and as I was leaving the library today saw one of the Sociology professors from the university where I work. Evidently I did such a good job, he rushed to the counter to see if he could check it out.
Because of the the wording of this book, I kept wondering about the old rule that one drop of negro blood made someone a negro. How white are the rest of us? What is in our background that we do ...more

4 likes · Like · see review

Jul 03, 2016 Pang rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: history, nonfiction, memoir-biography, 2016

I am not a cynic. I love you, and I love the world, and I love it more with every new inch I discover. But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you. And you must be responsible for the bodies of the powerful—the policeman who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find his excuse in your furtive movements. And

...more

2 likes · Like · see review

Nov 19, 2015 Laura marked it as to-read

Shelves: american-fiction, national-book-critics-circle-awards

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015... ...more

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Sep 14, 2015 Happyreader rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: progressive-thinking, bio-and-memoir, history-politics

Visceral and charged. Communicates powerfully racism’s literal threat to the body. There is no denying that we live in a racist society and that we need to own up to its reality and how it manifests to heal. Yet by the end, more emotional than thoughtful. Paris as racial nirvana? And what about his college friend Prince Carmen Jones being gunned down by a black cop from a police district run by a black police chief in a county with a growing affluent black population? Clearly an abuse of state-s ...more

1 like · Like · see review