The Message
The Sunday Times bestseller from the renowned author of Between the World and Me
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4.7 • 6 Ratings
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
The renowned author returns with a timely book about his journeys to three sites of conflict - Dakar, South Carolina, and Palestine - exploring how the stories we tell, and the ones we don’t, shape our realities.
‘An earnest and intimate exploration of locations of extreme injustice’ Oprah Daily
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Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, but soon found himself grappling with deeper questions about the destructive myths that shape our world.
First we join Coates on his inaugural trip to Africa – a journey to Dakar, where he finds himself in two places at once: a modern city in Senegal and the ghost-haunted country of his imagination.
He then takes readers to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on the banning of his own work and the deep roots of a false and fiercely protected American mythology – visibly on display in its segregationist statues.
Finally in Palestine, Coates sees with devastating clarity the tragedy that grows in the clash between the stories we tell and reality on the ground.
Written at a dramatic moment in American and global history, this work from one of our most important writers is about the urgent need to embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.
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‘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’ Booklist
‘Coats always writes with purpose . . . These pilgrimages for him, ground his powerful writing about race’ Associated Press
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Coates (Between the World and Me) delivers an incandescent rebuke of journalists—including himself—for parroting ideological narratives that reify Palestine's oppression. The book opens deceptively low-key, as an almost laconic rumination on the political nature of storytelling—a theme Coates weaves into recollections of an emotional visit he made to his ancestral homeland in Senegal, his radical Black father's intellectual commitment to the idea of a "return to Africa," and the banning of Between the World and Me in a North Carolina school district where he encountered white allies whose argument in the book's favor struck him as particularly clear-eyed: that there is need to hear many stories, not just one. This all crescendos to a devastating second half, in which Coates, beginning with a mea culpa for an uncritical defense of Israel that he embedded in his 2014 essay "The Case for Reparations," suggests that storytelling of an ideological nature—even his own and his own family's—elides too much, and that what is ultimately needed to arrive at justice is fact-based reporting. Coates then shifts into a more journalistic style, giving a straightforward, harrowing account of a 10-day visit he made to Palestine that minces no words ("I would sooner hear a defense of cannibalism than I would of what I saw with my own eyes in Hebron"). This is an incendiary shot fired over the bow of America's mainstream journalistic establishment.
