Get Free Shipping on orders over $89
The Message - Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Message

By: Ta-Nehisi Coates

Paperback | 1 October 2024

At a Glance

Paperback


$35.75

or 4 interest-free payments of $8.94 with

 or 
In Stock and Ships next day
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER  The renowned author of Between the World and Me journeys to three resonant sites of conflict to explore how the stories we tell-and the ones we don't-shape our realities.

"Ta-Nehisi Coates always writes with a purpose. . . . These pilgrimages, for him, help ground his powerful writing about race."-Associated Press

"Coates exhorts readers, including students, parents, educators, and journalists, to challenge conventional narratives that can be used to justify ethnic cleansing or camouflage racist policing. Brilliant and timely."-Booklist (starred review)

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, Vanity Fair, Town & Country

Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell's classic "Politics and the English Language," but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories-our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking-expose and distort our realities.

In the first of the book's three intertwining essays, Coates, on his first trip to Africa, finds himself in two places at once: in Dakar, a modern city in Senegal, and in a mythic kingdom in his mind. Then he takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on his own book's banning, but also explores the larger backlash to the nation's recent reckoning with history and the deeply rooted American mythology so visible in that city-a capital of the Confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares. Finally, in the book's longest section, Coates travels to Palestine, where he sees with devastating clarity how easily we are misled by nationalist narratives, and the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life on the ground. 

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country's most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world-and our own souls-and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.

More in Sociology & Anthropology

She Births : Your practical guide to a beautiful birth - Nadine Richardson
Light and Thread - Han Kang

RRP $29.99

$24.99

17%
OFF
We Should All be Feminists - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Goliath's Curse : The History and Future of Societal Collapse - Luke Kemp
Going On and On : Why Our Longevity Threatens the Future - Lucinda Holdforth
Black Skin, White Masks : Penguin Modern Classics - Frantz Fanon

RRP $26.99

$22.99

15%
OFF
Goliath's Curse : The History and Future of Societal Collapse - Luke Kemp
Invisible Boys : An award-winning LGBTQIA+ coming of age novel - Holden Sheppard
Talking to My Daughter : The Sunday Times Bestseller - Yanis Varoufakis
Notes on Nationalism : Penguin Modern - George Orwell
Bullshit Jobs : A Theory - David Graeber

RRP $26.99

$22.99

15%
OFF
The Dawn of Everything : A New History of Humanity - David Graeber
Sapiens A Graphic History, Volume 2 : The Pillars of Civilization - Yuval Noah Harari