This 2015 winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction – “a work of rare beauty and revelatory honesty” that is “highly provocative, thoughtfully presented” — is a meditation on race as a social construct. Written as a set of letters to his young son, it raises many important questions but does not offer solutions. It reminds me of another set of letters – Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet – which recommends having “patience with everything unresolved in your heart” so that “someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegal & Grau, 2015), 107.