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The Beautiful Struggle
- Narrated by: J. D. Jackson
- Length: 6 hrs and 20 mins
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A lyrical and authentic book that recounts the story of a border-town family in Brownsville, Texas in the 1980s, as each member of the family desperately tries to assimilate and escape life on the border to become "real" Americans, even at the expense of their shared family history. This is really un-mined territory in the memoir genre that gives in-depth insight into a previously unexplored corner of America.
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It was Okay
- By DebKoo on 05-17-13
By: Domingo Martinez
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Learning to Die in Miami
- Confessions of a Refugee Boy
- By: Carlos Eire
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 11 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Carlos Eire's story of a boyhood uprooted by the Cuban Revolution quickly lures us in, as eleven-year-old Carlos and his older brother Tony touch down in the sun-dappled Miami of 1962 - a place of daunting abundance where his old Cuban self must die to make way for a new, American self waiting to be born. In this enchanting new work, narrated in Eire's inimitable and lyrical voice, young Carlos adjusts to life in his new country.
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Excellent memoir of a forgotten time in history
- By BRB on 03-23-15
By: Carlos Eire
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The Gift of Our Wounds
- A Sikh and a Former White Supremacist Find Forgiveness After Hate
- By: Pardeep Singh Kaleka, Arno Michaelis, Robin Gaby Fisher
- Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne, John McLain
- Length: 6 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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When white supremacist Wade Michael Page murdered six people and wounded four in a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin in 2012, Pardeep Kaleka was devastated. The temple leader, now dead, was his father. His family, who had immigrated to the US from India when Pardeep was young, had done everything right. Why was this happening to him? Arno Michaelis, a former skinhead and founder of one of the largest racist skinhead organizations in the world, knew he had to take action and fight against the very crimes he used to commit.
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The Gift
- By M. Forsberg on 07-29-22
By: Pardeep Singh Kaleka, and others
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Bad Boy
- By: Walter Dean Myers
- Narrated by: Joe Morton
- Length: 4 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Into a memoir that is gripping, funny, heartbreaking, and unforgettable, Walter Dean Myers richly weaves the details of his Harlem childhood in the 1940s and 1950s: a loving home life with his adopted parents, Bible school, street games, and the vitality of his neighborhood. Although Walter spent much of his time either getting into trouble or on the basketball court, secretly he was a voracious reader and an aspiring writer.
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Tough times
- By Megan on 01-30-12
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Between the World and Me
- By: Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Narrated by: Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Length: 3 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race”, a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of Black women and men - bodies exploited through slavery and segregation and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a Black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son.
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A Heartfelt Self-aware Literary Masterpiece
- By T Spencer on 07-30-15
By: Ta-Nehisi Coates
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The House at Sugar Beach
- A Memoir
- By: Helene Cooper
- Narrated by: Helene Cooper
- Length: 9 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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At once a deeply personal memoir and an examination of a violent and stratified country, The House at Sugar Beach tells of tragedy, forgiveness, and transcendence with unflinching honesty and a survivor's gentle humor. And at its heart, it is a story of Helene Cooper's long voyage home.
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Can't recommend it
- By Taryn on 03-25-16
By: Helene Cooper
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The Ride of Our Lives
- Roadside Lessons of an American Family
- By: Mike Leonard
- Narrated by: Marc Cashman
- Length: 7 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Mike Leonard is a lucky man. It’s not everyone who gets parents like Jack and Marge. At 87, Jack is a pathological optimist with an inexhaustible gift of gab. Marge, Jack’s bride of 60 years, though cut from the same rough bolt of Irish immigrant cloth, is his polar opposite - pessimistic and proud of it. What was their son, Mike, thinking when he took a sabbatical from his job with NBC News so he could pile these two world-class originals along with three of his grown kids and a daughter-in-law into a pair of rented RVs and hit the road for a month?
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Hilarious!!!
- By TurtlesRMe on 03-06-07
By: Mike Leonard
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A Chance in the World
- An Orphan Boy, a Mysterious Past, and How He Found a Place Called Home
- By: Steve Pemberton
- Narrated by: Steve Pemberton
- Length: 8 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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A Chance in the World is the unbelievably true story of a wounded and broken boy destined to become a man of resilience, determination, and vision. Through it all, Steve's story teaches us that no matter how broken our past, no matter how great our misfortunes, we have it in us to create a new beginning and to build a place where love awaits.
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Good Book
- By Amazon Customer on 08-19-20
By: Steve Pemberton
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That’s That
- By: Colin Broderick
- Narrated by: Gerard Doyle
- Length: 8 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Colin Broderick was born in 1968 and spent his childhood in Tyrone County in Northern Ireland. It was the beginning of the period of heightened tension and violence known as the Troubles, and Colin’s Catholic family lived in the heart of rebel country. The community was filled with Provisional IRA members, whose lives depended on the silence and complicity of their neighbors. But even when Colin does ask his parents about these events, he never receives a clear explanation. Desperate to protect her children, Colin’s mother tries to prevent exposure to or knowledge of the harm that surrounds them.
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Well Written and Very Personal Memoir
- By Lulu on 01-08-16
By: Colin Broderick
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The Great Failure
- A Bartender, a Monk, and My Unlikely Path to Truth
- By: Natalie Goldberg
- Narrated by: Natalie Goldberg
- Length: 6 hrs and 46 mins
- Original Recording
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"The Great Failure is a boundless embrace, leaving nothing out. I wanted to learn the truth, to become whole. If I could touch the dark nature in someone else, I could know it in myself." So begins Natalie Goldberg in this candid exploration of her life. Here, Goldberg makes sense of primary relationships between father and daughter, teacher and student, and exemplifies the accomplishment available when creating daily writing practices.
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If you have been let down by anyone. Listen
- By Mia on 04-19-18
By: Natalie Goldberg
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Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race”, a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of Black women and men - bodies exploited through slavery and segregation and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a Black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell’s classic “Politics and the English Language,” but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities. 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.
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Coates is our Baldwin, our DuBois, our Douglass
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This audio study guide for The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates includes detailed summary and analysis of each chapter and an in-depth exploration of the book’s multiple symbols, motifs, and themes such as reparations for American slavery, white supremacy in the United States, and racial discrimination by the United States government. Featured content also includes commentary on major characters, 25 important quotes, essay questions, and discussion topics.
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The Horrors of Slavery and Jim Crow
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Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race”, a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of Black women and men - bodies exploited through slavery and segregation and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a Black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell’s classic “Politics and the English Language,” but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities. 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.
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As a conductor for the Underground Railroad - the covert resistance network created to aid and protect slaves seeking freedom - William Still helped as many as 800 people escape enslavement. He also meticulously collected the letters, biographical sketches, arrival memos, and ransom notes of the escapees. The Underground Railroad Records is an archive of primary documents that trace the narrative arc of the greatest, most successful campaign of civil disobedience in American history.
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This Book is Abridged by Two Thirds!
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In The Innocent Killer, Michael Griesbach tells the story of one of the nation's most notorious wrongful convictions, that of Steven Avery, a Wisconsin man who spent 18 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. But two years after he was exonerated of that crime and poised to reap millions in his wrongful conviction lawsuit, Steven Avery was arrested for the exceptionally brutal murder of Teresa Halbach, a freelance photographer who had gone missing several days earlier.
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In the wake of the September 11 attacks and the US-led invasion of Iraq, Suzy Hansen, who grew up in an insular conservative town in New Jersey, was enjoying early success as a journalist for a high-profile New York newspaper. Increasingly, though, the disconnect between the chaos of world events and the response at home took on pressing urgency for her. Seeking to understand the Muslim world that had been reduced to scaremongering headlines, she moved to Istanbul.
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A MUST-READ for all Truth-Seeking American wh
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America’s backstory is a whitewashed mythology implanted in our collective memory. It should come as no surprise that the dominant narrative of American history is blighted with errors and oversights—after all, history books were written by white men with their perspectives at the forefront. It could even be said that the devaluation and erasure of the Black experience is as American as apple pie. In Black AF History, Michael Harriot presents a more accurate version of American history.
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LOVE It!
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Justice for Some offers a new approach to understanding the Palestinian struggle for freedom, told through the power and control of international law. Focusing on key junctures—from the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to present-day wars in Gaza—Noura Erakat shows how the strategic deployment of law has shaped current conditions. Over the past century, the law has done more to advance Israel's interests than the Palestinians'. But, Erakat argues, this outcome was never inevitable.
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Excellent book bizarrely NOT narrated by the author
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How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America
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Brilliant and uncompromising, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America is essential listening. This new edition of award-winning author Kiese Laymon’s first work of nonfiction looks inward, drawing heavily on the author and his family’s experiences, while simultaneously examining the world—Mississippi, the South, the United States—that has shaped their lives. With subjects that range from an interview with his mother to reflections on Ole Miss football, Outkast, and the labor of Black women, these thirteen insightful essays highlight Laymon’s profound love of language.
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New York Times best-selling author and New York native Colson Whitehead composes a breathtaking tribute to his hometown. Whitehead captures the very essence of New York, infusing his reflections with the energy that permeates the city.
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James Baldwin’s critique of American society at the height of the civil rights movement brings his prescient thoughts on social isolation, race, and police brutality to a new generation of listeners.
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I wish there was more analysis…
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This sweeping survey of Black history shows how Black humanity has been erased and how its recovery can save the humanity of us all. Using history as a foundation, The Humanity Archive uses storytelling techniques to make history come alive and uncover the truth behind America's whitewashed history. The Humanity Archive focuses on the overlooked narratives in the pages of the past. Challenging dominant perspectives, author Jermaine Fowler goes outside the textbooks to find recognizably human stories.
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The Narrator's reading is unnerving.
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Four Hundred Souls
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A chorus of extraordinary voices comes together to tell one of history’s great epics: the 400-year journey of African Americans from 1619 to the present - edited by Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist, and Keisha N. Blain, author of Set the World on Fire.
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History never taught
- By Scott P ODonnell on 02-16-21
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The Fire Next Time
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At once a powerful evocation of his early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice to both the individual and the body politic, James Baldwin galvanized the nation in the early days of the civil rights movement with this eloquent manifesto. The Fire Next Time stands as one of the essential works of our literature.
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Sad and moving and powerful and beautiful
- By Darwin8u on 09-17-15
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The Intuitionist
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Lila Mae Watson - the first black female inspector in the world's tallest city - has the highest performance rating of anyone in the Department of Elevator Inspectors. This upsets her superiors, because Lila is an Intuitionist: she inspects elevators simply by the feelings she gets riding in them. When a brand new elevator crashes, Lila becomes caught in the conflict between her Intuitionist methods and the beliefs of the power-holding Empiricists.
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Fires on all cylinders; GREAT ! ! !
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What listeners say about The Beautiful Struggle
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- john wayne
- 04-10-17
Insightful
A poetically authentic tale from the mouth and mind of someone whose sat at the tables of those he wrote about.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Sha
- 10-14-19
a beautiful read
Well written narrative about a young man's coming of wisdom straight out of a disadvantage environment. Keep the reader engaged; good use of creative adjectives to capture attention and imagery. very enjoyable story.
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- Amazon Customer
- 03-24-21
Exceptional
Powerful account of a young man growing up in a troubled Baltimore during a period of darkness. Superbly written with exceptional narration. Always good to gain insights on the struggle of other people.
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- Janet M.
- 08-03-16
Wow!
This is one of the most engaging books I have ever read. Coates brings you into his world without pandering to you. I could not stop listening to it and was never disappointed.
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7 people found this helpful
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- Andrea
- 03-03-16
This is wonderful storytelling ,rich and lovely.
I really loved this story,to me it is about parenting right and choices against poor odds to persevere.
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1 person found this helpful
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- H. Easom
- 10-10-21
Gorgeously written, perfect narration
Ta-Nehisi Coates weaves his words masterfully. I am a huge fan of his prose, as it allows the reader to dance along through the chapters as though you’re experiencing the story with him. The narrator was perfect for this book - engaging and expressive.
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- Min. R. C. Clanton.
- 06-07-18
This story is one that took me back to my youth.
This is a great story of my youth as I remember back. Everything from trying to fit in, to school fights, seem to be a part of my everyday norm. it also helps me to relate to the youth that is coming up today, and how they could use more mentoring than mandating.
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- Darwin8u
- 02-24-16
I would always have the dagger at my throat.
"But all of us need myths. And here out West, where we all had lost religion, and had taken to barbarian law, what would deb our magic? What would be sacred words?"
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Beautiful Struggle
Beautiful. Haunting. Rythmic. Pulsing with life, love, and the development of consciousness. This is a memoir of a peer. Ta-Nehisi Coates is one year younger than me. We grew up watching the same things through different lenses. Watching the same play from vastly different seats. His was a lens of black America in West Baltimore. I was born a military brat, the son of a veterinarian and officer. My father was born to parents who hadn't graduated from high school, but through grit and determination, and the help of the military, put himself through college and UC Davis veterinary school. I was born into the privilege carved out of my father's grit.
Ta-Nehisi Coates' Quotes (#1): "I was a black boy at the height of the crack era, which meant that my instructors pitched education as the border between those who would prosper in America, and those who would be fed to the great hydra of prison, teenage pregnancy and murder."
— "School as Wonder, or Way Out," New York Times Magazine
But even with my father's boot-strap story, it is hard to look at my life as anything other than a collection of privilege. There were times when I was teased, perhaps, because of my ears. There were parents who were wary of their kids hanging out with a Mormon. But all of those slights and scars of youth seem insignificant and trivial compared to Coates and his peers of black youth (and their nervous mothers) raised in West Baltimore in the 80s. What I took for wind, in my life, was a breeze. What I thought was a mountain, in my path, was only a hill.
Ta-Nehisi Coates' Quotes (#2): ""The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from hosts and myths."
—"Letter To My Son," The Atlantic"
But the fantastic thing about good memoirs and Coates' memoir in particular is that you never feel outside the story. His journey -- despite the distance of space, AND because of the proximity of time, and the universality of fathers and sons -- is infinitely relatable. I understand his father, because I know my own father. I understand his insecurities, his vulnerabilities and his fears, his transformation between oblivion and consciousness, because I have walked that path. Not HIS path, but one that is etched through the same years. So, despite the severe differences between a black boy in Baltimore and a white boy in Orem, Coates is able to paint a bridge of words that gives me access. That allows me safe passage to another's core, a place to better understand him, but also better understand myself.
Ta-Nehisi Coates' Quotes (#3): "I would always be a false move away. I would always have the dagger at my throat."
— The Beautiful Struggle
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- Joe Kraus
- 02-24-16
The Birth of a Powerful Voice
Any additional comments?
On the one hand, we’ve seen this type of memoir before: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Claude Brown, Malcolm X, and others. And, yes, Coates belongs in that company. He talks about what it was like to grow up in a fiercely proud African-American household, and he describes his own coming of age in a society that fears him for his color and his potential.
On the other hand, we need this type of memoir in every generation. Each shares not just a story, but an implicit story behind the story, the growth of our narrator into someone who has “overcome” and developed a new voice for an old situation.
Coates’s voice is new in part because he has absorbed the rhythms and choppiness of hip-hop. If we hear jazz in Baldwin and some of the others, we hear a new, staccato sense here. Coates has a capacity for quick-change, for appreciating detail one moment and then taking off on a philosophical tangent. Or he’ll talk about a personal experience at length and then put it into the context of something larger. His world moves quickly, and he’s in a hurry to tell about it.
This isn’t a hip-hop memoir, though. Instead, it’s the story of the evolution of his capacity for sustained thinking, for connecting the disparate parts of his life. We get the outline of the story pretty quickly: he’s a kid who, under his father’s philosophy and in the wake of his older brother’s street-tough swagger, will find a way to make sense of what feel like conflicting impulses.
The details filling out that story come more slowly because they culminate not in a particularly great accomplishment (although his eventual success as a student is real) but in the capacity to tell the story. The happy ending is the voice itself, the speaker who grabs our attention from the very beginning. Coates is his own success, someone who presents himself here as prepared to give voice to the conflicts of his generation and the one(s) that follows.
And it really is a remarkable voice. I wrote down several of my favorite quotes just to get a feel in my own fingers for his distinctive tone:
Of some of the kids from his childhood, “They took one look around West Baltimore and knew they were the best it had to offer.”
“The [Black] Panthers’ faith exceeded their resolve.”
“Among the Conscious, a man was only worth his most recent read.”
And, after discovering a fresh wave of hip-hop musicians, “Slowly I came to see I was not the only one who was afraid.”
I’ve heard terrific things about Between the World and Me, and it’s high on my list for what to read next. If Coates is exercising the voice that’s born in this book in the ways I understand he is, then it really must be the masterpiece so many say.
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- brahrider
- 02-11-16
Wow!
Black Folk are Black Folk everywhere! Great book!! I have already read, "Between The World And Me", and am waiting for the next joint. Keep 'em coming brov! 13!
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