Best for: Fans of graphic novels in the Marvel universe. In a nutshell: I’m not entirely sure what is going on. Line that sticks with me: N/A Why I chose it: We are in the midst of a huge book purge because it costs an absurd amount of money to ship books overseas, and this one from my partner’s pile caught my eye. Review: I think this is a situation where I needed to have more background to fully understand what was going on. I […]
Our American Tragedy
Reading Between the World and Me was a revelation for me and many others. It brought Ta-Nehisi Coates into the mainstream conversation, and it added a component to the conversation about race and systemic racism in the United States. I was eager to read his new book, We Were Eight Years In Power, because it was a compilation of Atlantic articles during Barack Obama’s tenure as president of the United States. I had also read “The First White President” and was troubled and challenged by […]
No Explanatory Commas (and That’s A Good Thing)
In this beautifully written memoir, Ta-Nehisi Coates creates poetry on the page about growing up in and around Baltimore, the son of William Paul Coates, a former Black Panther but now a more scholarly activist and “Conscious Man.” Though present in all his children’s lives, the senior Coates had seven kids by four women and that creates a complicated extended family for Coates. He describes a childhood that is a mix of pop culture, “woke” politics, and neighborhood tensions and one that has Coates negotiating […]
I wish my younger self could have read this book.
First and foremost, I love, maybe even adore, Coates writing. He manages to weave narrative with fact and emotion with such grace and power. If I could write like anyone, it would be Ta-Nehisi Coates. But I can’t write like Coates. Even if we wrote with the exact same words, I could not write like him because I am not him. For a long time, especially as a younger man, I believed that if I wanted to do something, it could be done and that […]