\n A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.\n <\/p>\n
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Bearing witness to oppression.<\/p>\n
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans \u201cbefore the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage\u201d; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher\u2019s use of Between the World and Me <\/i>in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a \u201cHoly Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.\u201d By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me<\/i>; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and \u201cthe shade of Niggerology,\u201d a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: \u201cI don\u2019t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,\u201d he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel\u2019s tactics in the Middle East: \u201cThe wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which \u2018weak Jews\u2019 who went \u2018like lambs to slaughter\u2019 were supplanted by Israelis who would \u2018fight back.\u2019\u201d Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians\u2019 agony; their reality \u201cdemands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.\u201d <\/p>\n
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.<\/p><\/div>\n
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Pub Date:<\/b> Oct. 1, 2024<\/p>\n
ISBN:<\/b> 9780593230381<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n
Page Count:<\/b> 176<\/p>\n
Publisher:<\/b> One World\/Random House<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n
Review Posted Online:<\/b> Aug. 2, 2024<\/p>\n
Kirkus Reviews Issue:<\/b> Sept. 1, 2024<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
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