The Message
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER ¿ NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ¿ The renowned author of Between the World and Me journeys to three resonant sites of conflict to explore how the stories we tell-and the ones we don't-shape our realities.

“Ta-Nehisi Coates always writes with a purpose. . . . These pilgrimages, for him, help ground his powerful writing about race.”-Associated Press

“Coates exhorts readers, including students, parents, educators, and journalists, to challenge conventional narratives that can be used to justify ethnic cleansing or camouflage racist policing. Brilliant and timely.”-Booklist (starred review)

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, Vanity Fair, Town & Country

Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell's classic “Politics and the English Language,” but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories-our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking-expose and distort our realities.

In the first of the book's three intertwining essays, Coates, on his first trip to Africa, finds himself in two places at once: in Dakar, a modern city in Senegal, and in a mythic kingdom in his mind. Then he takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on his own book's banning, but also explores the larger backlash to the nation's recent reckoning with history and the deeply rooted American mythology so visible in that city-a capital of the Confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares. Finally, in the book's longest section, Coates travels to Palestine, where he sees with devastating clarity how easily we are misled by nationalist narratives, and the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life on the ground.

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country's most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world-and our own souls-and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.
1145001757
The Message
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER ¿ NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ¿ The renowned author of Between the World and Me journeys to three resonant sites of conflict to explore how the stories we tell-and the ones we don't-shape our realities.

“Ta-Nehisi Coates always writes with a purpose. . . . These pilgrimages, for him, help ground his powerful writing about race.”-Associated Press

“Coates exhorts readers, including students, parents, educators, and journalists, to challenge conventional narratives that can be used to justify ethnic cleansing or camouflage racist policing. Brilliant and timely.”-Booklist (starred review)

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, Vanity Fair, Town & Country

Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell's classic “Politics and the English Language,” but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories-our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking-expose and distort our realities.

In the first of the book's three intertwining essays, Coates, on his first trip to Africa, finds himself in two places at once: in Dakar, a modern city in Senegal, and in a mythic kingdom in his mind. Then he takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on his own book's banning, but also explores the larger backlash to the nation's recent reckoning with history and the deeply rooted American mythology so visible in that city-a capital of the Confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares. Finally, in the book's longest section, Coates travels to Palestine, where he sees with devastating clarity how easily we are misled by nationalist narratives, and the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life on the ground.

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country's most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world-and our own souls-and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.
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The Message

The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Narrated by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Unabridged — 5 hours, 20 minutes

The Message

The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Narrated by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Unabridged — 5 hours, 20 minutes

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Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates delivers a gripping account of some of our world's hardest truths, from Senegal to the American South to Palestine.

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER ¿ NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ¿ The renowned author of Between the World and Me journeys to three resonant sites of conflict to explore how the stories we tell-and the ones we don't-shape our realities.

“Ta-Nehisi Coates always writes with a purpose. . . . These pilgrimages, for him, help ground his powerful writing about race.”-Associated Press

“Coates exhorts readers, including students, parents, educators, and journalists, to challenge conventional narratives that can be used to justify ethnic cleansing or camouflage racist policing. Brilliant and timely.”-Booklist (starred review)

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, Vanity Fair, Town & Country

Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell's classic “Politics and the English Language,” but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories-our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking-expose and distort our realities.

In the first of the book's three intertwining essays, Coates, on his first trip to Africa, finds himself in two places at once: in Dakar, a modern city in Senegal, and in a mythic kingdom in his mind. Then he takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on his own book's banning, but also explores the larger backlash to the nation's recent reckoning with history and the deeply rooted American mythology so visible in that city-a capital of the Confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares. Finally, in the book's longest section, Coates travels to Palestine, where he sees with devastating clarity how easily we are misled by nationalist narratives, and the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life on the ground.

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country's most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world-and our own souls-and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

★ 10/21/2024

Coates (Between the World and Me) delivers an incandescent rebuke of journalists—including himself—for parroting ideological narratives that reify Palestine’s oppression. The book opens deceptively low-key, as an almost laconic rumination on the political nature of storytelling—a theme Coates weaves into recollections of an emotional visit he made to his ancestral homeland in Senegal, his radical Black father’s intellectual commitment to the idea of a “return to Africa,” and the banning of Between the World and Me in a North Carolina school district where he encountered white allies whose argument in the book’s favor struck him as particularly clear-eyed: that there is need to hear many stories, not just one. This all crescendos to a devastating second half, in which Coates, beginning with a mea culpa for an uncritical defense of Israel that he embedded in his 2014 essay “The Case for Reparations,” suggests that storytelling of an ideological nature—even his own and his own family’s—elides too much, and that what is ultimately needed to arrive at justice is fact-based reporting. Coates then shifts into a more journalistic style, giving a straightforward, harrowing account of a 10-day visit he made to Palestine that minces no words (“I would sooner hear a defense of cannibalism than I would of what I saw with my own eyes in Hebron”). This is an incendiary shot fired over the bow of America’s mainstream journalistic establishment. (Oct.)

From the Publisher

The Message charts Coates’s reentry as a public intellectual. . . . The rolling, elegiac cadences of much of his earlier work have yielded to a fury that’s harder edged. But a sense of shock also seems to have elicited in Coates a sense of possibility. . . . He is using his position of prominence and moral authority to draw attention to the plight of Palestinians.”The New York Times Book Review
 
“Ta-Nehisi Coates always writes with a purpose, so naming his latest collection The Message is nothing if not on-brand. But what’s the actual message? Consisting of three pieces of nonfiction, the book is part memoir, part travelogue, and part writing primer. . . . These pilgrimages, for him, help ground his powerful writing about race.”—Associated Press
 
The Message marks Coates’s first nonfiction book in nearly a decade, and it arrives at a critical flashpoint in our increasingly globalized society.”Harper’s Bazaar

“An earnest and intimate exploration of locations of extreme injustice, and of the power of writing to render a more compassionate—and more honest—future . . . At once a rallying cry and a love letter to writing itself, the book is an urgent reminder that ‘politics is the art of the possible, but art creates the possible of politics.’”Oprah Daily
 
“Ever since his Baldwin-inflected Between the World and Me, Coates has been known for his incisive (and sometimes uncomfortable) cultural and political commentary. Here he journeys from West Africa to the American South to Palestine to examine how the stories we tell can fail us, and to argue that only the truth can bring justice.”The Boston Globe
 
“With his signature incisiveness, Coates interrogates the intersections of race, power, and identity while blending historical insight and personal reflection. Through three essays, Coates presents a global perspective that challenges the status quo and dares us to envision a more just future.”SheReads
 
“With the game-changing success of his essay/memoir Between the World and Me, anything [Coates] writes will immediately command attention. Here he grapples with the power and danger of storytelling, the too easy way of shaping and softening reality.”Parade

“Brilliant and timely.”Booklist, starred review

“A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.”Kirkus Reviews, starred review

Searching and restless, The Message is filled with startling revelations that show a writer grappling with how his work fits into history and the present moment. These masterful essays will leave readers convinced that Coates is up to the task.”BookPage, starred review

“This is an incendiary shot fired over the bow of America’s mainstream journalistic establishment.”Publishers Weekly, starred review

OCTOBER 2024 - AudioFile

Author Ta-Nehisi Coates narrates this must-listen, a powerful and thought-provoking collection of essays. In recounting his travels to Senegal and South Carolina, Coates incisively reflects on slavery and white supremacy. From his travels to Israel and Palestine, Coates meditates on the trauma of the Holocaust, segregated society, dehumanization, and voices that are missing from the narratives we are told. Coates frequently addresses listeners in the second person, a technique that creates an intimate connection to his words. With his measured pacing and gentle delivery, he encourages listeners to ponder the important issues and questions he covers. This audiobook is a haunting, timely examination of global affairs and the importance of truth and inclusivity in our culture. V.T.M. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2024-08-02
Bearing witness to oppression.

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 “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use ofBetween the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” 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 informedBetween the World and Me; 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 “the shade of Niggerology,” 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: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”

A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.

Product Details

BN ID: 2940192643181
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Publication date: 10/01/2024
Edition description: Unabridged
Sales rank: 200,158

Read an Excerpt

I

Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world. —James Baldwin

Comrades,

In the summer of 2022, I returned to Howard University to teach writing. Given my rather middling career as a university student, I couldn’t help but feel somewhat sheepish about the honor. But it was an honor, because it was there that I met you. Our first class was in the woods—out in rural Virginia, where, with my friend the poet Eve Ewing, we spent two weeks reading, writing, and workshopping. I’ve been teaching writing in some form or capacity for almost as long as I’ve been a writer, and the only work I love more is writing itself. But with you I found the former rivaling the latter. I don’t mean to slight any other cohort of students I’ve taught in other times and places—all were talented and hardworking. But the fact is, we were drawn together by something more profound.

I guess it begins with our institution, and the fact that it was founded to combat the long shadow of slavery—a shadow that we understood had not yet retreated. This meant that we could never practice writing solely for the craft itself, but must necessarily believe our practice to be in service of that larger emancipatory mandate. This was often alluded to, if not directly stated. All of our work dealt with the kind of small particulars of being human that literature generally deals with. But when you live as we have, among a people whose humanity is ever in doubt, even the small and particular—especially the small and particular—becomes political. For you there be no real distance between writing and politics. And when I saw that in you, I saw myself.

A love of language, of course, is the root of this self. When I was barely six months old, I would crawl over to my father’s speakers when he played the Last Poets. And when the record ended, I would cry until he played it again. At five I would lay on my bed, with the Poems and Rhymes volume of the Childcraft series splayed open to “The Duel,” and all day I could not help but to murmur to myself, “The gingham dog and the calico cat / Side by side on the table sat.” I did this for no other reason than the way the words felt in my mouth and fell on my ears. Later I discovered that there were MCs—human beings seemingly born and reared for the sole purpose of matching the music of language to an MPC snare or 808 kick—and the ensuing alchemy felt as natural to me as a heartbeat:

I haunt if you want, the style I possess

I bless the child, the earth, the gods and bomb the rest

Haunt. You’ve heard me say this word a lot. It is never enough for the reader of your words to be convinced. The goal is to haunt—to have them think about your words before bed, see them manifest in their dreams, tell their partner about them the next morning, to have them grab random people on the street, shake them and say, “Have you read this yet?” That was what I felt whenever I heard Rakim spit, or for that matter the Last Poets. That was the thing that had me murmuring lines from Childcraft. This affliction was enchantment and desire. It was pleasure but also a deep need to understand the mechanics of that pleasure, the math and color behind words, and all the emotions they evoked. I imagine there are children who see a painting and cannot get the image out of their minds. I imagine they turn it over alone at night in the dark, haunted, considering and reconsidering, and a small secret ecstasy grows in them each time they do this, and, just behind this, a need to convey an ecstasy all their own. I was like that from the moment I could inscribe words into memory. And this instinct naturally linked to the world around me, because I lived in a house overflowing with language organized into books, most of them concerned with “the community,” as my mother would put it. And so it was made clear to me that words could haunt not only in form, not only in their rhythm and roundness, but in their content.

When I was seven years old, my mother purchased a copy of Sports Illustrated for me. She taught me to read before I entered school, and encouraged the practice however she could. And what more encouragement could there be than this issue of Sports Illustrated, which featured my hero, Tony Dorsett, running back for the Dallas Cowboys. This was 1983, an era of American football when running backs seemed as large as champions pulled out of Greek myth. How could a man of Earl Campbell’s might move so fast, racing past one defender and then staving in the chest of another? How could Eric Dickerson run so high, against all convention, bounding through holes in the defense, an obvious target that was never caught? These days I will occasionally watch an old clip of Roger Craig, through will alone, breaking off a forty-six-yard run against the Rams or Marcus Allen reversing field in the Super Bowl. But back then, in an unwired world, stories, words, histories—none of it could be gotten on demand. If you bore witness to such a feat—as I did with Allen—it lived in memory until the broadcast gods decided you could see it again. And so a magazine featuring the exploits of one of these heroes was not just, to me, an assembly of words and stories. It was a treasure.

Because I really did believe that Tony Dorsett was magic. He was five foot eight, built ordinary as one of my uncles. But when he slid the lone-starred helmet over his head, he transformed into something untouchable. I remember him darting through the defense, shifting direction at full speed, dancing, sprinting the length of the field, and outrunning an entire team. But whatever my affinity for Dorsett, this is not what I remember about that issue. In fact, until a few months ago, I’d forgotten that Dorsett was even on the cover at all, because deeper in the magazine, I found a story so unsettling, so horrific even, that it blotted out every adjacent detail.

The story was titled “Where Am I? It Has to Be a Bad Dream.” Its subject was Darryl Stingley, who’d once been a wide receiver. I thought of wide receivers as mythical too—contortionists like Wes Chandler, extending back to snag a ball bouncing off into the ether, or acrobats like Lynn Swann, dancing in the air. I absorbed these exploits on Sunday mornings through highlights curated by the NFL itself. But a magazine like Sports Illustrated existed beyond the garden, out in the street where journalism and literature collided. And out there was neither magic nor myth—only the realest of monsters.

And so I read the true story of Stingley, who back in 1978 took a hit on a slant route and woke up in a hospital. The story began there, in the hospital—with Stingley unable to move a single limb, unable to call to his mother or wipe the tears running down his face. In an instant, the contortionist had been rendered quadriplegic. Only a few paragraphs in, I wanted to put the magazine down forever, to escape the story, but I was held fast by forces I could not then understand. I knew that there was something different in the storytelling, something in its style, that pulled me toward it with the gravity of a star, until I was there, I was on the field, yelling, pleading with Stingley to watch out for the incoming hit, and then in the hospital, right next to him, helpless to relieve the horror blooming in his eyes as he realized his fate. And then the star became a black hole, and I crossed an event horizon where I was no longer imagining myself there with Stingley, but was Stingley himself, and it was my body pinned to the bed, and the spokes were drilled into my skull, and it was I crying out to a heedless god.

I haunt if you want, the style I possess. And I was haunted—by a style, by language. And, dimly, instinctually, I understood that the only exorcism lay in more words. I went to my father and bombarded him with questions, because that was the kind of child I was, always (to the annoyance of my siblings) asking why. My father’s way of dealing with this was patented and that day he executed the maneuver to perfection. He led me to the back room, where he kept a large collection of books, and pulled one down from the shelf. The book was They Call Me Assassin. It was the memoir of Jack Tatum—the defensive back who’d laid the crushing hit on Stingley.

And so I delved deeper—hoping for some insight into the mindset of a man who had permanently crippled another. I’d like to tell you I found some great revelation here, but the book was mostly filled with stories of Tatum’s only vaguely interesting football career. I recall Tatum writing that the hit on Stingley was unremarkable in its violence. If a reader came, as I did, looking for some profound meditations on a catastrophe, it was not to be found. And so I was left again to grapple on my own—no Google, no Wikipedia, no social network through which to commiserate with others. Just me and this terrible story of an acrobat entombed in his own body playing over and over in the back of my mind.

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