An exceptional father-son story from the National Book
Award-winning author of Between the World and Me about the reality
that tests us, the myths that sustain us, and the love that saves
us.
Paul Coates was an enigmatic god to his sons: a Vietnam vet who rolled
with the Black Panthers, an old-school disciplinarian and new-age
believer in free love, an autodidact who launched a publishing company
in his basement dedicated to telling the true history of African
civilization. Most of all, he was a wily tactician whose mission was to
carry his sons across the shoals of inner-city adolescence--and through
the collapsing civilization of Baltimore in the Age of Crack--and into
the safe arms of Howard University, where he worked so his children
could attend for free.
Among his brood of seven, his main challenges were Ta-Nehisi, spacey and
sensitive and almost comically miscalibrated for his environment, and
Big Bill, charismatic and all-too-ready for the challenges of the
streets. The Beautiful Struggle follows their divergent paths through
this turbulent period, and their father's steadfast efforts--assisted by
mothers, teachers, and a body of myths, histories, and rituals conjured
from the past to meet the needs of a troubled present--to keep them
whole in a world that seemed bent on their destruction.
With a remarkable ability to reimagine both the lost world of his
father's generation and the terrors and wonders of his own youth, Coates
offers readers a small and beautiful epic about boys trying to become
men in black America and beyond.
Praise for The Beautiful Struggle
"I grew up in a Maryland that lay years, miles and worlds away from the
one whose summers and sorrows Ta-Nehisi Coates evokes in this memoir
with such tenderness and science; and the greatest proof of the power of
this work is the way that, reading it, I felt that time, distance and
barriers of race and class meant nothing. That in telling his story he
was telling my own story, for me."--Michael Chabon, bestselling author
of The Yiddish Policemen's Union and The Amazing Adventures of
Kavalier & Clay
"Ta-Nehisi Coates is the young James Joyce of the hip hop
generation."--Walter Mosley
