"Between the World and Me" by Ta-Nehisi Coates

If "How to Be an Antiracist" by Ibram X. Kendi was a gently introspective, fairly analytical approach to a seemingly unsolvable social problem, then "Between the World and Me" by Ta-Nehisi Coates is the exact opposite.  It's not gentle, it's not about data, it's an angry, almost poetic rant on the tragedies of living a Black life in America.  This is pain, raw pain, drawn from the death of Black men in this country.  What Mr. Coates refers to, frequently, as the daily attack on the Black body.  The book is composed of three parts, separated into short chapters.  It is framed as a letter from Coates to his son, a young man who is growing up now, not in the sixties and seventies when racism was rampant but not broadcast out to social media.  The author recognizes that his son is both privileged by seeing a world beyond color and yet is easily damaged when the realities of the killings of Black people are broadcast night after night on television.  The book is raw, the style lyric.  Hemingway would be proud of the lengthy paragraphs, which take an issue and address them at infinitum until the reader is wrung out.  In some ways, reading this book was, for me, not unlike watching "12 Years a Slave."  It's brutal, it's ugly, it's sad ... and it is powerful.  I liked Kendi's book, which made me think.  A LOT.  This book is more about making the reader feel.  You just may not like the feelings which arise.