The Message
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4.7 • 225 Ratings
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- $14.99
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.
Customer Reviews
A form of Enlightenment
All I can say is that this is an incredibly moving work that touched me deeply as a human being. I can only thank the author for sharing his thoughts and experiences in such a profound way. I’m not sure if the message is one of hope or despair… I feel more despair currently; however, there are seeds for hope within these pages.
a better human being for reading this
A literary hard pill
The author forces us to face the narratives put on people. To not merely believe what we read from publications bent on creating enemies out of them and supporting inhumane notions of oppression as historical facts. Rather, he encourages us to look deeper, to experience, and not only observe and judge.
Speaking Truth to Power
Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Message” is an exploration of, indictment of, and challenge to the powers that be; specifically in how they have distorted the literal message history has tried to teach us. Coates starts off by establishing that to communicate a history or idea is to virtue-signal, and virtue-signaling is to set a target on your back for those in power to aim at. “The Message” is loud and clear on this premise. Coates challenges us to be brave enough to wear that target because the fight is just.
The proof of the righteousness of that cause is laid out in his essays from one to the next. From Jim Crow South to the pervasive anti-intellectualism in current times to “democracies” far away that specialize in suppression. It is particularly disturbing when the oppressed turn into oppressors. Coates uses these connections to show that the language of evil is effective at blinding us to “The Message” of truth. That any reality built on the subjugation, oppression, and manipulation of any part of humanity is a crime against all of it and a non-starter in any intellectual or moral debate.
Conversely, Coates explores how the written word, when used for good, can frame a truer picture of reality, invoke critical thinking, and set us free. Free minds are better at spotting intellectual dishonesty, moral inconsistencies, and the mental gymnastics employed by those who seek to control. The perverted word and history starts to resemble a grotesque simulation of reality as to make you want to lose all hope. The universality of the effort to control history becomes apparent and underscores the banality of evil that Hannah Arendt expounded on.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is the James Baldwin of our time. Unapologetic in his truth-telling and uncompromising in his appeal to humanity. His essays extol the promise of humanity and the perpetual atrocities that suppress that bright future. There is a resonant power in his gift for painting experience with language, shaping argument with metaphors and facts, while also lacing in hope where you least expect it. “The Message” may be his magnum opus. Warning, this may radicalize you. But that would be the point.