The Beautiful Struggle

By: Ta-Nehisi Coates

Narrated by: J. D. Jackson

Ta-Nehisi Coates' debut is an infectious, reflective memoir - a lyrical saga of surviving the crack-stricken streets of Baltimore in the '80s. Son of Vietnam vet and black awareness advocate Paul Coates - a poor man who set out to publish lost classics of black history - Ta-Nehisi drifts toward salvation at Howard University, while his ominous brother Big Bill finds his own rhythm hustling.©2008 Ta-Nehisi Coates (P)2008 Recorded Books,LLC

Insightful

A poetically authentic tale from the mouth and mind of someone whose sat at the tables of those he wrote about.

a beautiful read

Well written narrative about a young man's coming of wisdom straight out of a disadvantage environment. Keep the reader engaged; good use of creative adjectives to capture attention and imagery. very enjoyable story.

Exceptional

Powerful account of a young man growing up in a troubled Baltimore during a period of darkness. Superbly written with exceptional narration. Always good to gain insights on the struggle of other people.

Wow!

This is one of the most engaging books I have ever read. Coates brings you into his world without pandering to you. I could not stop listening to it and was never disappointed.

This is wonderful storytelling ,rich and lovely.

I really loved this story,to me it is about parenting right and choices against poor odds to persevere.

Gorgeously written, perfect narration

Ta-Nehisi Coates weaves his words masterfully. I am a huge fan of his prose, as it allows the reader to dance along through the chapters as though you’re experiencing the story with him. The narrator was perfect for this book - engaging and expressive.

This story is one that took me back to my youth.

This is a great story of my youth as I remember back. Everything from trying to fit in, to school fights, seem to be a part of my everyday norm. it also helps me to relate to the youth that is coming up today, and how they could use more mentoring than mandating.

I would always have the dagger at my throat.

"But all of us need myths. And here out West, where we all had lost religion, and had taken to barbarian law, what would deb our magic? What would be sacred words?"
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Beautiful Struggle

Beautiful. Haunting. Rythmic. Pulsing with life, love, and the development of consciousness. This is a memoir of a peer. Ta-Nehisi Coates is one year younger than me. We grew up watching the same things through different lenses. Watching the same play from vastly different seats. His was a lens of black America in West Baltimore. I was born a military brat, the son of a veterinarian and officer. My father was born to parents who hadn't graduated from high school, but through grit and determination, and the help of the military, put himself through college and UC Davis veterinary school. I was born into the privilege carved out of my father's grit.

Ta-Nehisi Coates' Quotes (#1): "I was a black boy at the height of the crack era, which meant that my instructors pitched education as the border between those who would prosper in America, and those who would be fed to the great hydra of prison, teenage pregnancy and murder."
— "School as Wonder, or Way Out," New York Times Magazine

But even with my father's boot-strap story, it is hard to look at my life as anything other than a collection of privilege. There were times when I was teased, perhaps, because of my ears. There were parents who were wary of their kids hanging out with a Mormon. But all of those slights and scars of youth seem insignificant and trivial compared to Coates and his peers of black youth (and their nervous mothers) raised in West Baltimore in the 80s. What I took for wind, in my life, was a breeze. What I thought was a mountain, in my path, was only a hill.

Ta-Nehisi Coates' Quotes (#2): ""The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from hosts and myths."
—"Letter To My Son," The Atlantic"

But the fantastic thing about good memoirs and Coates' memoir in particular is that you never feel outside the story. His journey -- despite the distance of space, AND because of the proximity of time, and the universality of fathers and sons -- is infinitely relatable. I understand his father, because I know my own father. I understand his insecurities, his vulnerabilities and his fears, his transformation between oblivion and consciousness, because I have walked that path. Not HIS path, but one that is etched through the same years. So, despite the severe differences between a black boy in Baltimore and a white boy in Orem, Coates is able to paint a bridge of words that gives me access. That allows me safe passage to another's core, a place to better understand him, but also better understand myself.

Ta-Nehisi Coates' Quotes (#3): "I would always be a false move away. I would always have the dagger at my throat."
— The Beautiful Struggle

The Birth of a Powerful Voice

Any additional comments?

On the one hand, we’ve seen this type of memoir before: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Claude Brown, Malcolm X, and others. And, yes, Coates belongs in that company. He talks about what it was like to grow up in a fiercely proud African-American household, and he describes his own coming of age in a society that fears him for his color and his potential.

On the other hand, we need this type of memoir in every generation. Each shares not just a story, but an implicit story behind the story, the growth of our narrator into someone who has “overcome” and developed a new voice for an old situation.

Coates’s voice is new in part because he has absorbed the rhythms and choppiness of hip-hop. If we hear jazz in Baldwin and some of the others, we hear a new, staccato sense here. Coates has a capacity for quick-change, for appreciating detail one moment and then taking off on a philosophical tangent. Or he’ll talk about a personal experience at length and then put it into the context of something larger. His world moves quickly, and he’s in a hurry to tell about it.

This isn’t a hip-hop memoir, though. Instead, it’s the story of the evolution of his capacity for sustained thinking, for connecting the disparate parts of his life. We get the outline of the story pretty quickly: he’s a kid who, under his father’s philosophy and in the wake of his older brother’s street-tough swagger, will find a way to make sense of what feel like conflicting impulses.

The details filling out that story come more slowly because they culminate not in a particularly great accomplishment (although his eventual success as a student is real) but in the capacity to tell the story. The happy ending is the voice itself, the speaker who grabs our attention from the very beginning. Coates is his own success, someone who presents himself here as prepared to give voice to the conflicts of his generation and the one(s) that follows.

And it really is a remarkable voice. I wrote down several of my favorite quotes just to get a feel in my own fingers for his distinctive tone:

Of some of the kids from his childhood, “They took one look around West Baltimore and knew they were the best it had to offer.”

“The [Black] Panthers’ faith exceeded their resolve.”

“Among the Conscious, a man was only worth his most recent read.”

And, after discovering a fresh wave of hip-hop musicians, “Slowly I came to see I was not the only one who was afraid.”

I’ve heard terrific things about Between the World and Me, and it’s high on my list for what to read next. If Coates is exercising the voice that’s born in this book in the ways I understand he is, then it really must be the masterpiece so many say.

Wow!

Black Folk are Black Folk everywhere! Great book!! I have already read, "Between The World And Me", and am waiting for the next joint. Keep 'em coming brov! 13!