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

by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Author)

207 customer reviews

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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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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.

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Product details

Paperback: 240 pages
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau; Reprint edition (January 6, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0385527462
ISBN-13: 978-0385527460
Product Dimensions: 4.9 x 0.6 x 7.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 207 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #21,446 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #40 in Books > Parenting & Relationships > Family Relationships > Fatherhood
- #52 in Books > Parenting & Relationships > Parenting > Parenting Boys
- #161 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Ethnic & National > African-American & Black

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Jeff H

Required reading

February 9, 2016

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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.

25 people found this helpful26 people found this helpful

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K.Petillo

A good read for all of my BLACK brothers. Sister's read this, it may help shed some light on things.

December 6, 2017

Verified Purchase

Pros:
Read this, share this with your sons, your brothers, you fathers, your grandfathers, your cousins, your friends.
As black men we go through struggles. One way to learn, to cope, to understand oneself better is to talk to or read about those who have or continue to struggle as well. Let us lift up one another and stop the breaking down.

The book requires a good sit down and read don't be afraid to take out your dictionary and look up words you may not understand in this beautifully written book. Also please please please! My brothers, some of the books mentioned in the beautiful struggle should put you on on the path to seek out and research those mentioned. It will help guide you, heal you and shape your opinions of the world you see in front of you that doesn't value YOU!
Learn, grow, be beautifully unapologetically proud BLACK!

12 people found this helpful13 people found this helpful

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SunshineLil

Coates Is More than a Hero

March 3, 2016

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He is as honest as a black man can be in our culture. I'm sure he uses language as a means to push past the outer layers of our engrained racism.

He does not allow us time to ponder on his truths, he intends, I believe, to create a story where we will want, even desire a second and third reading. This will be for those men who believe themselves white, and who have the courage to read it, an epiphany. Can they embrace these truths?

And who of us has the strength to embrace the truth in book and use those truths to make a difference.

8 people found this helpful9 people found this helpful

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Elizabeth Strejcek

The Beautiful Struggle

January 13, 2016

Verified Purchase

I read this seeking a different point of view. I found it on the recommended list and it intrigued me. At first the language and descriptions threw me, (his experience is in an era younger than mine, but a similar neighborhood to the one in which I grew up) but I decided to let his language tell the story , embracing it, instead of fighting it. I found the descriptions poetic and truthful. I have to admit, I loved it and am reading another book of his.

9 people found this helpful10 people found this helpful

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W. Deason

I Could Relate

January 2, 2018

Verified Purchase

I feel honored to share my opinion on this memoir. Many wonderful books were on my wishlist from Christmas and I knew I wanted to start the new year off with material that would leave an impression on me so I chose The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nehisi Coates and it was everything I had thought it would be. I was able to relate to Coates' memoir in so many ways. I grew up during the same time and came from a similar neighborhood so it was just a matter of me relating my own experiences to those that were shared in the memoir.

2 people found this helpful3 people found this helpful

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Bobby Williams

Necessary ... unfortunately.

December 22, 2015

Verified Purchase

Brilliant, Necessary, Required and at the same time bewildering. That we have to caution, teach and live life tethered to a prayer that our mainly young men and boys are able to simply make it home safely, is sobering. To live in this condition daily is heart wrenching, but also necessary in our Black American reality. To date I've bought numerous copies and gave them as gifts to all the young men and fathers in my barbershop.

7 people found this helpful8 people found this helpful

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Jay Goldman

A beautiful read

January 1, 2016

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This is the universal story of fathers and sons regardless of where they're born and raised. Ta-Nehisi and I are almost the same age and yet grew up in parallel universes on the same continent. My beautiful struggle was much less intense than his — much more of the "normal" that he describes as the desired state — and yet his beautiful turn of phrase gave me an understanding of how his life was lived. So lucky for all of us that he chose to share it, and to shed light into what may otherwise have remained in darkness.

6 people found this helpful7 people found this helpful

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laprof

A Meander worth the read

August 31, 2018

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I only know Ta-Nehisi Coates as an elegant writer. This is his autobiography thus far, and it's a good story, as he lets us into his head throughout. I was curious to know how he became a writer, and his story highlights that. It's not a simple chronology, nor a continuous storyline, but I felt like he was piecing his childhood days together to figure it all out, that is, how he became who he is. I enjoyed the journey, though he's not done yet, and that resonated with me. I found it worth my time, following his thoughts.

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