The Beautiful Struggle: A Memoir

It’s brilliant every time. Unflinching in its honesty, and brave in its story telling. Still my favorite of Coates’s body of work.

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.

sadly, this book is overlooked when the more popular Between the World and Me is discussed. Between the World and Me is the second installment of coates’ memoir, picking up where The Beautiful Struggle leaves off with the young coates preparing for college. the coming of age story of the first memoir brings to mind the progression of language found in joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and the language of place, an urban idiom in coates’ case, evokes the poetry of dylan thomas—a mention of a green hill by coates may be a toast to dylan thomas’ Fern Hill and its catalogue of green things.the grittiness and toughness of inner-city culture during the 1980s as negotiated by a boy and his siblings and peers isn’t unique to coates’ early years as writer. like several black american writers of his generation, coates acknowledges the importance of hip-hop as a literary form for making sense of black street life as it involves gangs, drugs and promiscuity as early as the pre-teen years. what makes the story his own are his parents, especially the afro-centric teachings of coates’ father, small press publisher of black histories and former black panther. the coates’ children had the good fortune of having a father who worked at howard university at a time when children of employees received a free education and was in the home in a culture where the absent father had become pretty much the norm. as wavering as the path through the tempting streets of the inner city was, there was a lodestar, howard university, known as the black mecca.unlike joyce and his stephen daedalus or james baldwin, coates was not a self-proclaimed genius with an eye on the prize. that the prize was there, and along the way were always guides, made the difference.hopefully, in the future, some publisher will publish both memoirs under one cover.

This is one of the most beautiful books I've ever read. The author is MUCH MORE famous for his other book, but this one was like reading poetry, and it's a memoir. And if you are a part of white America and feel out of touch with the black experience and want a safe look in, especially because it's pretty violence adjacent, it's like a diorama. And haters I'm not saying his one experience is a representation of every black person's experience, it isn't, I'm saying this book is beautifully written and everyone should read it, and buy it and make this magnificent artist rich. It is so beautifully written I read every sentence over and over and over. I usually read 4 books a week. I'm a reader. I read 2 fiction and 2 non-fiction; I read fast and I read for pleasure. I don't do this- or haven't ever done it before, but I read every sentence at least twice. You MUST get and read this book, and buy 2 because if you love anyone who likes to read or likes poetry or storytelling, you're going to want to give them a copy too.

Without a doubt, Coates is my favorite author and this book displays all of his writing and storytelling talents. Focusing on his relationship with his father and his own coming of age revelations, this story pieces together the undertold, overlooked, and misunderstood life of a black boy from Baltimore. A searing and gripping memior that you will not be able to put down. I highly recommend for any black man looking to explore the interiority of black male lives.

Beautifully written by author Ta-Nehisi Coates! Inspiring and captivating, a young man journey to manhood through his eyes. The cast of parents, friends and associates all fill the pages in this wonderfully written tale.

It's a good read but somewhat choppy. I almost gave up though in the first couple of pages as I couldn't understand the street language used to open the book. After the opening it the street language is less (or I become familiar with it) and you are cheering for a young boy who is struggling not to get sucked into the wasted life of the streets in Baltimore and his father who is trying to show him there is a different path to travel.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is the author of one of the best written and more important non-fiction books of the last 25 years: “We Were Eight Years in Power”, his best book so far and which is all in one: an autobiography, a history book, an essay on the American society in the beginnings of the XXI Century, a case for the reparations for the slavery years in America, a cultural self-help manual, a chronicle on the Obama Presidency, a report on the current estate of the racial issues in America; and then else. That important “else” is the two main factors around which Coates have built the ten first years of his career, first as a journalist then as a writer.This one book, "The Beautiful Struggle" is his autobiography, of sorts.Born in Baltimore in 1975, Coates grew in a working-class neighbour plagued with gangs and crack in which losing a friend to either of the two was completely normal. His refuge, assisted by both parents (his father was an activist and small-time publisher and his mother a teacher) was the studies, first, and then and more importantly, the library. His personal revelation came from the books – “I was born for the library not for the classroom”, he said. Reading voraciously took him to reporting, and suffering discrimination to go deeper into American History to understand it. His articles for the periodical “The Atlantic” started calling the attention of general readers since 2007, but the publication in June of 2014 of the long piece “The Case for Reparations”, about the right of the American blacks to be compensated for the racism and slavery after the American Civil War, made him a promising star in the cultural world. His “We were Eight Years in Power”, the compilation of eight of his collaborations in The Atlantic (each one roughly to coincide with each one of the years of the Obama Presidency), only confirm his status as one of the best nonfiction writers in English.With perhaps too much of insistence, he has been appointed as the heir of James Baldwin by such a heavy weight as the late Toni Morrison. It is a fair (and obvious) comparison, but it is still too soon. Baldwin had a very long career – he started writing while the Truman Presidency, just after World War II and in his last articles he commented on the success of Michael Jackson. Yet the vast quantity of the Baldwin's works was matched with quality, and also by a wide and varied range of interests: writer, novelist, polemicist, cinema reviewer, memoirist, orator, and theatre and screen player (he wrote the first draft of the screenplay about the life of Malcolm X in 1968, ultimately filmed by Spike Lee in 1992). James Baldwin belongs to that special breed of writers and commentators of the XX Century – utterly coherent and tireless critics of any form of fascism or totalitarianism, or discrimination and racism, and who also wrote excellent pieces of fiction. This is the class of George Orwell and Albert Camus. And these are big names.But there are sound similarities between Coates and Baldwin, for instance a superb control of the prose in English – Coates uses effortlessly terms like “carceral”, “survivalist”, “listicle” and yet he is a very easy author to read. Also, Coates keeps a very healthy distance with politics and religion in search for answers. Coates knows full well that the solution to racism lies not in Marxism like Malcolm X (initially) or W. E. B. Du Bois; nor through religions: via the Islam like, again, Malcolm X, nor through Christianity like Dr Martin L King. The answer is moral – paraphrasing Emerson, “why some find pleasure in holding a human being under his absolute control?”Any flaws? None major. Perhaps a lack of sense of humour, even of irony. We miss it after reading pages and pages some light touch. Coates' style ends up being too serious, almost solemn. And it is not the themes – James Baldwin wrote about the same (and in even harder times) and very often softened his speech with a touch of irony. To quote only one: “my mother had the strange habit of had one baby after another; I remember my teenage years reading and holding the book with one hand and a baby with the other”. We never read lines like these in Coates. He should loosen up a little / after all James Baldwin did it in bleaker circumstances.In “The Anatomy of Influence”, writing about the rampant degeneration of the American political, social and cultural life in the early XXI Century, Harold Bloom states that one of the reasons for that degeneration is that there're not cultural giants, such as Ralph W Emerson in these times. Now there's Coates. He's not yet a giant, but he's only in his mid forties and has a very long career ahead. Furthermore, he's got the talent and is in the right - Emersonian - side of the reason. He needs just time to express himself.Reading books like this beautiful struggle, we realise how much the world needs more writers like him.

muito bom, mas a leitura é dificultada por existir muitos termos específicos do contexto cultural dos estados unidos.

The story of a black father with kids from various women, trying to grow all of them up successfully despite living in difficult quarters of Baltimore in a time of violence and drugs. The ways of the father are special, however successful. The book is difficult to read (for a European) as it relies on specific local language. However, the story is worth to read.

Having just read 'Between the world and me', I was eager to dive into another piece of Coates' work as he is truly a phenomenal writer. I was happy to see his familiar writing style in this brilliantly crafted memoir, one that is just as hard to put down as his latest national book awarded masterpiece. Coates is truly the new voice of black intellectualism and has a way of conveying important messages that are raw, gripping and unapologetic in nature. Quite frankly, I'm amazed that he has only written two books thus far and eagerly await his next project.

It is about what is different and what is the same for African Americans since Martin King, Malcolm X, and the Panthers. Developing an American identity is an effortless, default experience for most Americans. For others it is still a fierce struggle, often external but always internal, which may have only a fragile, tentative outcome. The rest of us must listen to this story.