The Message
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- USD 11.99
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- USD 11.99
Publisher Description
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The renowned author of Between the World and Me journeys to three resonant sites of conflict to explore how the stories we tell—and the ones we don’t—shape our realities.
“Ta-Nehisi Coates always writes with a purpose. . . . These pilgrimages, for him, help ground his powerful writing about race.”—Associated Press
“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. Brilliant and timely.”—Booklist (starred review)
FINALIST FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, Vanity Fair, Town & Country, Electric Lit
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. Then he takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on his own book’s banning, but also explores the larger backlash to the nation’s recent reckoning with history and the deeply rooted American mythology so visible in that city—a capital of the Confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares. Finally, in the book’s longest section, Coates travels to Palestine, where he sees with devastating clarity how easily we are misled by nationalist narratives, and the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life on the ground.
Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
In this collection of three extended, incredibly powerful essays, Ta-Nehisi Coates travels the world to uncover truths about injustice and inequality that might just rock you to your core. In each essay, Coates describes a journey to a different place and the transformative lessons he learns there. In Senegal, he immerses us in the former hub of the global slave trade and contemplates the chasm between African and African American identity. In South Carolina, he speaks firsthand to teachers who faced pushback for teaching his books in school after students claimed his works made them ashamed to be white. In Israel and Palestine, he directly observes the disparity between the living conditions of two segregated peoples, drawing sharp parallels between what he witnesses and the Jim Crow South—all while acknowledging how the horrors of the Holocaust helped shape the situation. The insights Coates gleans across each journey are fearlessly penetrating as he questions his own ingrained beliefs and inspires us to do the same.
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.
