Between the World and Me

Written as a letter to his teenage son, Ta-Nehisi Coates's 2015 book confronts what it means to be Black in the United States. Coates retells American history as a record of racist violence and draws on an abridged account of his own youth in Baltimore to show how schools, the police and the streets endanger Black bodies. The letter moves through Howard University, Civil War battlefields, Chicago's South Side and Paris. Its form follows James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, though Coates sees white supremacy as a force that will never be erased, only resisted. It won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and reached the final round of the Pulitzer Prize.

Barack Obama named it among his summer favorites in a 2015 list of reading picks, and Jack Dorsey mentioned it in a Product Hunt session when asked about the books that influenced him most or that he liked best. Walmart chief executive Doug McMillon included it in a Facebook post of his favorite reads from 2017.