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The Beautiful Struggle
A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood
By: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Paperback | 6 January 2009
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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
Industry Reviews
"A brilliant coming-of-age story." --People
"A remarkable, blunt portrait of an adolescence filled with danger, chaos, flaws, and tragedy . . . a love story, dispatched from the front lines of a family." --Time Out New York
"A searing and soulful memoir." --Michael Eric Dyson, author of April 4, 1968
ISBN: 9780385527460
ISBN-10: 0385527462
Published: 6th January 2009
Format: Paperback
Language: English
Number of Pages: 240
Audience: General Adult
Publisher: SPIEGEL & GRAU
Country of Publication: US
Dimensions (cm): 20.32 x 13.34 x 1.27
Weight (kg): 0.18
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