Augie Reads 2019-2020: Between the World and Me

This is a series of reviews and reader responses to the book, as part of an online book club hosted by the magazine The Atlantic, where Coates is a national correspondent.

Alexander, a lawyer, legal scholar, and author of the recent book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness, discusses how hopeful she was when she first read Between the World and Me that it would give Coates’s answers to how to overcome racism; how she was disappointed and overwhelmed by the lack of answers; and how she then reread the book, seeing it in a new light.

Shani O. Hilton, in this review for BuzzFeed, says that too often books about being African American treat men’s experience as universal. Hilton compares her own experience at Howard with Coates’s and critiques Between the World and Me for not addressing women enough.

Pinckney looks at how African-American writers, including Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, have discussed and debated what it means to be black in a deeply racist society, and how Coates adds to that conversation in Between the World and Me.

Using the stories of African Americans and unions that have fought back against oppression, R.L. Stephens, in this review for Viewpoint Magazine, critiques Between the World and Me as focusing too much on racism and not enough on class struggle.