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A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Book Reviewed by:An exceptional father-son story about the reality that tests us, the myths that sustain us, and the love that saves us.
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.
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. The
Beautiful Struggle 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.
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.
Coates's description of his growing years in drug and violence-riddled West Baltimore is simultaneously ugly and beautiful – a glimpse into a city of barely controlled chaos and a portrait of a father clinging and dragging his children into safe adulthoods. The author's honesty is unflagging, revealing flaws in himself just as easily as those he observes in his father, brother, teachers and friends. His language flows from the page to the ear, producing a silent chorus of hip hop rhythms, street speak and African tribal beats in the mind. Though the book's vernacular may not be familiar to everyone – I confess to needing a dictionary for many terms and phrases – Coates's relaxed and rhythmic language creates a lasting impression. The Beautiful Struggle is a compelling blend of family memoir and social commentary, a book worthy of a wide audience...continued
Full Review
(509 words)
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(Reviewed by Stacey Brownlie).
The author's father, Paul Coates, was a member of the Black Panther Party. As Coates describes in his book, the Party's original aims concerned self-defense and social justice. Bobby Seale and Huey Newton founded the Party in 1966. Its diverse membership, however, made cohesion difficult and produced geographically clustered varieties of the socialism, counter-culturalism and Black Nationalism for which the Party became known. The Black Panthers frequently clashed with law enforcement: FBI Counter Intelligence Programs (COINTELPRO), for example, investigated the group's alleged connections to communism and hate-related violence across the U.S. Many in the Black community felt that the police and government were unfairly ...
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James McBride, author of The Color of Water
A superb debut by an extraordinary young talent. Coates describes with poetic eloquence another country that is, most painfully, ours; the father who raised him is a smoldering fire whose boundless love reaches across the room; his older brother Bill is a willow tree, bent low against the wind, and young Coates a child who, without bitterness or rancor, bore witness to the flight of his own innocence.
