By the Book: Celebrate Father’s Day with these two books that explore filial love and complicated histories | Parenting News,The Indian Express
While Ruskin Bond’s memoir takes young readers through the time he spent with his father, Ta-Nehisi Coates explores generational racial wounds suffered by African Americans in his seminal letter to his son
Two books that bring the world home — an exploration of race and the timeless bond between a father and son:
Between the World and Me Ta-Nehisi Coates One World 176 pages Rs 599 Appropriate for: 12+ years
The lives we create for ourselves are most often built on a generational foundation created through the interaction of individual and community lives. It is a legacy bestowed on us that has both the capacity to anchor and unroot. A seminal work of non-fiction that was published in 2015 to critical acclaim, Between the World and Me by former The Atlantic journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates is written in the form of a letter to his adolescent son and explores America’s complicated racial history and what it means to be a Black person in America in the 21st century. As a journalist, Coates has written on the intersection of society, politics and culture in American life, but in this award-winning book, he offers a more personal understanding of and reaction to its fallouts on individual lives.
“This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it,” writes Coates to his son. Through his writing, he offers a framework to make sense of America’s rising White supremacy, built on a prejudicial understanding of race that propagated an exploitative system of slavery and segregation and whose modern-day fallout includes indiscriminate and often senseless violence against African Americans.
Coates weaves in his personal story with crisp reportage, an astute interrogation of history with a clear-eyed analysis of its impact on African Americans over the years. To know one’s history is also the first step to see oneself more clearly in the mirror of time. Between the World and Me is a brilliant step in that direction, a map of sorts that illuminates the past while offering a vision for the way ahead.
Rating: 5