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The Beautiful Struggle: A Memoir Paperback – January 6, 2009

4.6 out of 5 stars 1,819

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An exceptional father-son story from the National Book Award–winning author of Between the World and Me about the reality that tests us, the myths that sustain us, and the love that saves us.

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

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From the Publisher

Essence says, “Haunting and healing . . . a splendid memoir.”

Time Out New York says “A portrait of an adolescence filled with chaos, tragedy, and a love story.”

Walter Mosley says, “Ta-Nehisi Coates is the young James Joyce of the hip-hop generation.”

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Ta-Nehisi Coates is the young James Joyce of the hip-hop generation.”
—Walter Mosley


“Haunting and healing . . . a splendid memoir”
—Essence

“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

About the Author

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent for The Atlantic. His book Between the World and Me won the National Book Award in 2015. Coates is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. He lives in New York City with his wife and son.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ One World; Reprint edition (January 6, 2009)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 240 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0385527462
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0385527460
  • Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1000L
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.97 x 0.62 x 7.47 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 out of 5 stars 1,819

About the author

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Ta-Nehisi Coates
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Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Between the World and Me, a finalist for the National Book Award. A MacArthur “Genius Grant” fellow, Coates has received the National Magazine Award, the Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism, and the George Polk Award for his Atlantic cover story “The Case for Reparations.” He lives in New York with his wife and son.

Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5 stars
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Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on November 1, 2023
It’s brilliant every time. Unflinching in its honesty, and brave in its story telling. Still my favorite of Coates’s body of work.
Reviewed in the United States on August 15, 2017
This is one of the most beautiful books I've ever read. The author is MUCH MORE famous for his other book, but this one was like reading poetry, and it's a memoir. And if you are a part of white America and feel out of touch with the black experience and want a safe look in, especially because it's pretty violence adjacent, it's like a diorama. And haters I'm not saying his one experience is a representation of every black person's experience, it isn't, I'm saying this book is beautifully written and everyone should read it, and buy it and make this magnificent artist rich. It is so beautifully written I read every sentence over and over and over. I usually read 4 books a week. I'm a reader. I read 2 fiction and 2 non-fiction; I read fast and I read for pleasure. I don't do this- or haven't ever done it before, but I read every sentence at least twice. You MUST get and read this book, and buy 2 because if you love anyone who likes to read or likes poetry or storytelling, you're going to want to give them a copy too.
9 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on May 25, 2009
Coates' book is a public appreciation of his parents' labors to keep him alive physically, mentally, and spiritually during the crack wars that coincided with his turbulent teenage years. He makes it out. But the trail wound around some hairpin curves overlooking precipitous cliffs that stopped the heart cold. He knows how close he and his siblings came to falling over the edge. He was lucky in his all-too-human father who was always there when the principal called to say Coates misbehaved and a mother who clawed out an entree into Howard University for her underperforming yet promising child. He clearly loves them and is grateful for their struggle and high expectations of him.

Coates writes beautiful crackling prose that energizes the book. Its a quick and pleasurable read.
4 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on March 5, 2024
A nice coming of age story of a black family, but different from traditional white picket fence stories or ghetto struggles.
Reviewed in the United States on February 9, 2016
I found this book to be an excellent companion to Mr Coates' more recent work  Between the World and Me . The Beautiful Struggle is a lyrical journey through West Baltimore and sheds more detailed light on some of the incidents mentioned in his second book. It shows the many paths a young person could take when faced with the results of multi-generational systemic racism and focuses on the father, the author, and an older brother. Without the social context the book would be an entertaining memoir, by the kind of writer who transports the reader into the story. Action, romance, drama, everything is here. Also a bit of Black Panther Party history, African music study, etc. It is more than just a good book though, considering where we are in this country, considering we have to be told black lives matter, considering the carte blanche granted to the police departments, it is an indispensable view of the other side.

I think both of these books should be required reading for people like me, that is people who have to check the white, non-hispanic box on surveys. While reading a couple (or a hundred) books will never place you in the shoes of someone who has experienced the struggle in real life, books like this will open your/our/their eyes to what is often swept under the rug as we pretend to live in some sort of post-racial utopia. It's never going to happen if we as a society, we as a country, don't realize, acknowledge, and try to remedy all the harm caused in the black community through decades of legislation. I considered myself conscious before reading any of Mr Coates' work and now feel like I'm on step one again. There is a lot of knowledge out there.
87 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on March 14, 2011
I've been a fan of Ta-Nehisi Coates via his blog at The Atlantic since '08, and fully expected to enjoy this memoir just based on the commonalities I'd already found in his writing. More than a memoir, it's a prose poem; a non-linear, unapologetically free verse ode to his formative years.

Five years my junior, Coates' childhood had many parallels and intersections with my own, and for me, this book is to memoir as 
Willie Perdomo  was/is to poetry. In the moments I didn't see myself in these pages, I saw family and friends; I saw the Bronx of the '80s, and my own move to the suburbs. For him, there was the djembe; for me, poetry, the difference being it came much later in life for me. On the question of fathers, and what makes a good one, I'd side with what he seemingly realizes in the end, that being flawed and present is better than being absent.

Such a powerful read. Highly recommended!
3 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on July 31, 2018
It's a good read but somewhat choppy. I almost gave up though in the first couple of pages as I couldn't understand the street language used to open the book. After the opening it the street language is less (or I become familiar with it) and you are cheering for a young boy who is struggling not to get sucked into the wasted life of the streets in Baltimore and his father who is trying to show him there is a different path to travel.
7 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on February 24, 2023
Beautifully written by author Ta-Nehisi Coates! Inspiring and captivating, a young man journey to manhood through his eyes. The cast of parents, friends and associates all fill the pages in this wonderfully written tale.
4 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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Robert ‘Bob’ Macespera
5.0 out of 5 stars Magnificent. A star is born
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 16, 2021
Ta-Nehisi Coates is the author of one of the best written and more important non-fiction books of the last 25 years: “We Were Eight Years in Power”, his best book so far and which is all in one: an autobiography, a history book, an essay on the American society in the beginnings of the XXI Century, a case for the reparations for the slavery years in America, a cultural self-help manual, a chronicle on the Obama Presidency, a report on the current estate of the racial issues in America; and then else. That important “else” is the two main factors around which Coates have built the ten first years of his career, first as a journalist then as a writer.
This one book, "The Beautiful Struggle" is his autobiography, of sorts.
Born in Baltimore in 1975, Coates grew in a working-class neighbour plagued with gangs and crack in which losing a friend to either of the two was completely normal. His refuge, assisted by both parents (his father was an activist and small-time publisher and his mother a teacher) was the studies, first, and then and more importantly, the library. His personal revelation came from the books – “I was born for the library not for the classroom”, he said. Reading voraciously took him to reporting, and suffering discrimination to go deeper into American History to understand it. His articles for the periodical “The Atlantic” started calling the attention of general readers since 2007, but the publication in June of 2014 of the long piece “The Case for Reparations”, about the right of the American blacks to be compensated for the racism and slavery after the American Civil War, made him a promising star in the cultural world. His “We were Eight Years in Power”, the compilation of eight of his collaborations in The Atlantic (each one roughly to coincide with each one of the years of the Obama Presidency), only confirm his status as one of the best nonfiction writers in English.
With perhaps too much of insistence, he has been appointed as the heir of James Baldwin by such a heavy weight as the late Toni Morrison. It is a fair (and obvious) comparison, but it is still too soon. Baldwin had a very long career – he started writing while the Truman Presidency, just after World War II and in his last articles he commented on the success of Michael Jackson. Yet the vast quantity of the Baldwin's works was matched with quality, and also by a wide and varied range of interests: writer, novelist, polemicist, cinema reviewer, memoirist, orator, and theatre and screen player (he wrote the first draft of the screenplay about the life of Malcolm X in 1968, ultimately filmed by Spike Lee in 1992). James Baldwin belongs to that special breed of writers and commentators of the XX Century – utterly coherent and tireless critics of any form of fascism or totalitarianism, or discrimination and racism, and who also wrote excellent pieces of fiction. This is the class of George Orwell and Albert Camus. And these are big names.
But there are sound similarities between Coates and Baldwin, for instance a superb control of the prose in English – Coates uses effortlessly terms like “carceral”, “survivalist”, “listicle” and yet he is a very easy author to read. Also, Coates keeps a very healthy distance with politics and religion in search for answers. Coates knows full well that the solution to racism lies not in Marxism like Malcolm X (initially) or W. E. B. Du Bois; nor through religions: via the Islam like, again, Malcolm X, nor through Christianity like Dr Martin L King. The answer is moral – paraphrasing Emerson, “why some find pleasure in holding a human being under his absolute control?”
Any flaws? None major. Perhaps a lack of sense of humour, even of irony. We miss it after reading pages and pages some light touch. Coates' style ends up being too serious, almost solemn. And it is not the themes – James Baldwin wrote about the same (and in even harder times) and very often softened his speech with a touch of irony. To quote only one: “my mother had the strange habit of had one baby after another; I remember my teenage years reading and holding the book with one hand and a baby with the other”. We never read lines like these in Coates. He should loosen up a little / after all James Baldwin did it in bleaker circumstances.
In “The Anatomy of Influence”, writing about the rampant degeneration of the American political, social and cultural life in the early XXI Century, Harold Bloom states that one of the reasons for that degeneration is that there're not cultural giants, such as Ralph W Emerson in these times. Now there's Coates. He's not yet a giant, but he's only in his mid forties and has a very long career ahead. Furthermore, he's got the talent and is in the right - Emersonian - side of the reason. He needs just time to express himself.
Reading books like this beautiful struggle, we realise how much the world needs more writers like him.
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Abayomi Mandela Silva Félix
4.0 out of 5 stars livro muito pessoal que compartilha a experiência de homens negros no caminho da paternidade
Reviewed in Brazil on November 5, 2019
muito bom, mas a leitura é dificultada por existir muitos termos específicos do contexto cultural dos estados unidos.
B.K.
4.0 out of 5 stars difficult to read, but worth reading
Reviewed in Germany on December 4, 2016
The story of a black father with kids from various women, trying to grow all of them up successfully despite living in difficult quarters of Baltimore in a time of violence and drugs. The ways of the father are special, however successful. The book is difficult to read (for a European) as it relies on specific local language. However, the story is worth to read.
Bear the cat
5.0 out of 5 stars The best mixtape I've ever read..
Reviewed in Canada on February 13, 2016
Having just read 'Between the world and me', I was eager to dive into another piece of Coates' work as he is truly a phenomenal writer. I was happy to see his familiar writing style in this brilliantly crafted memoir, one that is just as hard to put down as his latest national book awarded masterpiece. Coates is truly the new voice of black intellectualism and has a way of conveying important messages that are raw, gripping and unapologetic in nature. Quite frankly, I'm amazed that he has only written two books thus far and eagerly await his next project.
Cliente de Kindle
5.0 out of 5 stars A must-read for all Americans
Reviewed in Spain on May 19, 2015
It is about what is different and what is the same for African Americans since Martin King, Malcolm X, and the Panthers. Developing an American identity is an effortless, default experience for most Americans. For others it is still a fierce struggle, often external but always internal, which may have only a fragile, tentative outcome. The rest of us must listen to this story.