The author of the bestseller Between the World and Me and recipient of a MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’ last year, Ta-Nehisi Coates is a much-lauded African-American journalist on the Atlantic, best know for his trenchant 2014 essay making the case for reparations for black Americans.
A bona fide heir to the mantle of ‘hip-hop intellectual’ (last claimed with any credibility by Michael Eric Dyson), Coates is a rara avis, able to move with ease between Rakim, Q-Tip, W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington.
The Beautiful Struggle, written in 2008 but only now published in the UK, is a memoir of the writer’s perilous journey from boyhood to manhood in inner-city Baltimore in the late 1980s and early 1990s — when it was ravaged by crack cocaine and gang warfare. As he navigates the maelstroms of adolescence, Coates’s journey takes him from socially gauche teenager surrounded by B-boys with hoop dreams to unexpected academic high-achiever.
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At its core, The Beautiful Struggle is a moving story of education for liberation and the search for anchorage and self-knowledge in a hostile, unforgiving world — one in which the odds are still heinously stacked against young men of colour.
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