The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood
<b><b>An exceptional father-son story <b>from the National Book Award–winning author of <i>Between the World and Me </i></b>about the reality that tests us, the myths that sustain us, and the love that saves us.</b><br /><br /></b>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 across the shoals of inner-city adolescence—and through the collapsing civilization of Baltimore in the Age of Crack—and into the safe arms of Howard University, where he worked so his children could attend for free. <br /><br />Among his brood of seven, his main challenges were Ta-Nehisi, spacey and sensitive and almost comically miscalibrated for his environment, and Big Bill, charismatic and all-too-ready for the challenges of the streets. <i>The Beautiful Struggle </i>follows their divergent paths through this turbulent period, and their father’s steadfast efforts—assisted by mothers, teachers, and a body of myths, histories, and rituals conjured from the past to meet the needs of a troubled present—to keep them whole in a world that seemed bent on their destruction. <br /><br />With a remarkable ability to reimagine both the lost world of his father’s generation and the terrors and wonders of his own youth, Coates offers readers a small and beautiful epic about boys trying to become men in black America and beyond. <br /><br /><b>Praise for <i>The Beautiful Struggle</i></b><br /><br />“I grew up in a Maryland that lay years, miles and worlds away from the one whose summers and sorrows Ta-Nehisi Coates evokes in this memoir with such tenderness and science; and the greatest proof of the power of this work is the way that, reading it, I felt that time, distance and barriers of race and class meant nothing. That in telling his story he was telling my own story, for me.”<b>—Michael Chabon, bestselling author of <i>The Yiddish Policemen’s Union</i> and </b><i><b>The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay</b><br /><br /></i>“Ta-Nehisi Coates is the young James Joyce of the hip hop generation.”<b>—Walter Mosley</b>