Its one of the strange facts of 2017 that so much of the pop culture we consume was conceived, for better or worse, in an entirely different world from the one we find ourselves living in now.
The achievements of Americas first black president, the virtually assured female candidate coming up just behind him, certain truths we held to be self-evident: All look very different through the battered lens of a long year.
Journalist and black public intellectual (a mantle he still wears uneasily) Ta-Nehisi Coates would probably be the first man to condemn any soft rewrite of recent history.
Credit: Random House
Like 2015s National Book Award-winningBetween the World and Me, his latest eight essays originally published inThe Atlanticover the past decade, each revisited in new forewords brings both a big stick and a scalpel to the hornets nest of what the books subtitle dubsAn American Tragedy:the ugly and often unchallenged realities of race from the Civil War through last Nov. 8.
Coates isnt in the business of offering facile solutions, and certain arguments wont be new to readers steeped in the movement, but there is a fresh clarity to Powers voice urgent, outraged, electric thats never felt more necessary.A-
