NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER NAMED ONE OF TIMES TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST Hailed by Toni Morrison as required reading a bold and personal literary exploration of Americas racial history by the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race Rolling Stone NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL BOOKS OF THE DECADE BY CNN NAMED ONE OF PASTES BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review O The Oprah Magazine The Washington Post People Entertainment Weekly Vogue Los Angeles Times San Francisco Chronicle Chicago Tribune New York Newsday Library Journal Publishers Weekly In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son TaNehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nations history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of race a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and menbodies exploited through slavery and segregation and today threatened locked up and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden Between the World and Me is TaNehisi Coatess attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his sonand readersthe 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 childrens lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative reima