The Message
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- USD 11.99
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- USD 11.99
Descripción editorial
#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.
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.
