After a grand jury refused to prosecute Ferguson, MO police officer Darren Wilson for the August 2014 murder of Michael Brown, Ta-Nehisi Coates sat down to write a love letter to his teenage son. Between the World and Me is that letter: a concise, but detailed, account of the author’s experiences being black in the United States and France, at a historically black university in Washington, D.C. and a theater on the Upper West Side. The short memoir is a searing, melancholy treatise on 20th and 21st century relations between black men and white society in the US. Continue reading →