The Beautiful Struggle
Subtitle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Published: 2009
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 240
ISBN-13: 9780385527460
Subjects: Biographies & Memoirs -- Ethnic & National -- African-American & Black; Biographies & Memoirs -- Memoirs; Nonfiction -- Social Sciences -- Sociology -- Marriage & Family
Description: Paul Coates was an enigmatic god to his sons: a Vietnam vet who rolled with the Black Panthers, an old-school disciplinarian and new-age believer in free love, an autodidact who launched a publishing company in his basement dedicated to telling the true history of African civilization. Most of all, he was a wily tactician whose mission was to carry his sons through inner-city adolescence--and through Baltimore in the Age of Crack--and into the safe arms of Howard University, where he worked so his children could attend for free. Among his brood of seven, his main challenges were Ta-Nehisi, spacy and sensitive and almost comically miscalibrated for his environment, and Big Bill, charismatic and all-too-ready for the challenges of the streets. This book follows their divergent paths, and their father's steadfast efforts to keep them whole in a world that seemed bent on their destruction.--From publisher description.