Between the World and Me

Between the World and Me
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
Forget, for a moment, the ubiquitous comparisons to James Baldwin: Though fitting in many ways, they can distract us from how original Coates’s book truly is. Structured as a letter to his teenage son, this slender, urgent volume — a searching exploration of what it is to grow up black in a country built on slave labor and “the destruction of black bodies” — rejects fanciful abstractions in favor of the irreducible and particular. Coates writes to his son with a cleareyed realism about the beautiful and terrible struggle that inheres in flesh and bone.
Spiegel & Grau. $24.