“The story of race and America is a brutally simple one, written on flesh: it is the story of the black body, exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, still disproportionately threatened, locked up and killed in the streets. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can America reckon with its fraught racial history? ‘Between the World and Me’ is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer those questions, presented in the form of a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, ‘Between the World and Me’ illuminated the past, confronts the present and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.”