Booktalk

What to say about this book.

It is not a hopeful book. It demands that we draw back the curtain on our history (and on the present) to confront slavery, prejudice, and exploitation not as anomalies, or asides, or past imperfections in the fabric of America, but as strategic, calculated realities that endure.

Coates grinds down the pomp and march of our way of life until it blisters with the cruelty, fear, and intimidation that has worked to “plunder” the opportunities, if not the very “bodies” and daily commerce of black Americans. As a message directed to his son, prompted by violence committed against young black men that headlines our news, it is part indictment, part warning, part elegy, part apology for the entrenched “Dream” that most Americans live.

His earnestness and passion tempers any attempt one might mount to discount his observations as hyperbole. It takes the whole book, the whole experience of his life, his fatherhood, and his loss to at last see the present through his eyes. It is a stacked, harrowing, and relentlessly challenging America for his son to participate in. Only a loving parent could so deliver such a brutally honest message to a child on the cusp of adulthood.
DD