![]() ![]() ![]() The inexplicable death, which occurred when Coates' son was 1 month old, inspires the author to delve deeper into his writing. This intimate epistle dually serves as a eulogy for Coates' former classmate at Howard University, Prince Carmen Jones, who, though unarmed, was pursued by a black police officer dressed like an undercover drug dealer, shot and killed. ![]() In "Between the World and Me," his second, riveting book (written as a letter to his son), Coates delivers a fiery soliloquy dissecting the tradition of the erasure of African-Americans beginning with the deeply personal - his childhood memories of fear in West Baltimore ("Everyone had lost a child, somehow, to the streets, to jail, to drugs, to guns") and his son's devastation upon learning about the non-indictment of Darren Wilson in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown. ![]() Perhaps when writer Ta-Nehisi Coates named his son Samori, after Samori Touré, a warrior who resisted French colonizers in West Africa and later died in captivity, he had a faint idea that 14 years later Coates would write that son a letter exposing the epidemic slaughter of the black body and the construction of the American dream on its very corpse. ![]()
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