The Beautiful Struggle, by Ta-Nahisi Coates
Review
“A superb debut by an extraordinary young talent. Coates describes with poetic eloquence another country that is, most painfully, ours; the father who raised him is a smoldering fire whose boundless love reaches across the room; his older brother Bill is a willow tree, bent low against the wind, and young Coates a child who, without bitterness or rancor, bore witness to the flight of his own innocence.” --James McBride, author of The Color of Water
"A searing and soulful memoir of a black father and his sons that tells the truth about the virtues and costs of the black freedom struggle. Ta-Nehisi Coates is a sharp-eyed, quick-witted observer whose haunting eloquence and lively intelligence introduce to us one of the most brilliant writers of his generation.”
– Michael Eric Dyson, author of Know What I Mean?
"A beautiful story of manhood from a beautiful American city, where emotions fall as hard as rain and can prove to be just as cleansing. But the most remarkable thing in The Beautiful Struggle is the voice of Ta-Nehisi Coates, which lingers in the ear. A find you're not likely to forget." —Neely Tucker, author of Love in the Driest Season
“An intoxicating reminder of why we carry worn paperbacks in our coat pockets, fall asleep with memoirs on our chests. We want to believe in the promise that great literature can make us see ourselves anew. With his lyrical language, zoom-lens detail, and seductive storytelling, Ta-Nehisi Coates proves himself to be a promise keeper.”
--Michael Datcher, author of Raising Fences
From Random House
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.