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The Message

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Narrator Ta-Nehisi Coates

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Length 5 hours 20 minutes

Language English

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Bookseller recommendation

“This should be required reading. Either apartheid is wrong or it’s not.”
— Erin • Massy Books

Bookseller recommendation

“A good book is always right on time! The Message is a moment in our culture that we can return to time and time again. Expect nothing but fire from Ta-Nehisi Coates.”
— Kendra McNeil • We Are LIT

Bookseller recommendation

“Through lived experiences Ta-Nehisi learns about the world and how to put it into words.”
— Catherine • Artisans Books & Coffee

Bookseller recommendation

“An unflinching and deeply personal musing on what nonfiction writing (particularly long-form journalism) can accomplish. What frames do we take with us as we travel in search of truth? How is the past reframed in the service of myth-making? How can it be understood in a fuller way? This book is worth reading for the Israel/Palestine chapter alone, in which Coates reconsiders his glib approach to Israel-as-exemplar in his influential Atlantic article, “The Case for Reparations.” ”
— Perin G. • Brain Lair Books

Bookseller recommendation

“I love listening to nonfiction narrated by the author! In these essays, Ta-Nehisi Coates demonstrates a concept we should all practice; that is, the ability to unlearn what we've always believed to be true when presented with new facts. He accomplishes this through the lens of storytelling and its power to change people. The most profound example is when he travels to Palestine and realizes the narrative accepted by the Western world (a narrative he himself used in a previously published piece on reparations) is far removed from reality. These extremely powerful essays will be recommended reading for years to come.”
— Becca N. • Bookmarks

Bookseller recommendation

“Three powerful and necessary essays on writing, politics and colonialism. Coates reports with subtlety and meaning on three different topics : his first trip to Africa, visiting Dakar, his experience with the books ban and American history, and finally his trip to Palestine and the realizations he made there, and back home. And he does it all while deeply questioning the very act of writing. ”
— Camille • Nouvelle Librairie Internationale V.O

Bookseller recommendation

“Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell’s classic Politics and the English Language, but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories - our reporting and imaginative narratives and myth making - expose and distort our realities. And he does this in such a great, informative, interesting way. There are some really brilliant sentences and the way he reads his story out loud, it's so worth to listen to his work.”
— Liz • The Little Bookshop

Summary
About the author
About the narrator

#23 in Bestselling Audiobooks #1 in Bestselling Essays Audiobooks

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The renowned author of Between the World and Me journeys to three resonant sites of conflict to explore how the stories we tell—and the ones we don’t—shape our realities.

“Ta-Nehisi Coates always writes with a purpose. . . . These pilgrimages, for him, help ground his powerful writing about race.”—Associated Press

“Coates exhorts readers, including students, parents, educators, and journalists, to challenge conventional narratives that can be used to justify ethnic cleansing or camouflage racist policing. Brilliant and timely.”—Booklist (starred review)

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, Vanity Fair, Town & Country, Electric Lit

Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell’s classic “Politics and the English Language,” but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities.

In the first of the book’s three intertwining essays, Coates, on his first trip to Africa, finds himself in two places at once: in Dakar, a modern city in Senegal, and in a mythic kingdom in his mind. Then he takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on his own book’s banning, but also explores the larger backlash to the nation’s recent reckoning with history and the deeply rooted American mythology so visible in that city—a capital of the Confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares. Finally, in the book’s longest section, Coates travels to Palestine, where he sees with devastating clarity how easily we are misled by nationalist narratives, and the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life on the ground.

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.

Politics & Economy Essays Nonfiction Social Science

Ta-Nehisi Coates is the author of The Beautiful Struggle, We Were Eight Years in Power, The Water Dancer, and Between the World and Me, which won the National Book Award in 2015. He is the recipient of a National Magazine Award and a MacArthur Fellowship. He is currently the Sterling Brown endowed chair at Howard University in the English department.

Audiobook details

Author Ta-Nehisi Coates

Narrator Ta-Nehisi Coates

ISBN 9780593916421

Length 5 hours 20 minutes

Language English

Publisher Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group

Publication date October 1, 2024

Edition Unabridged

Genres Politics & Economy, Essays, Nonfiction & Social Science

Libro.fm rank #23 Overall

Genre rank #1 in Essays

Reviews

“The Message charts Coates’s reentry as a public intellectual. . . . The rolling, elegiac cadences of much of his earlier work have yielded to a fury that’s harder edged. But a sense of shock also seems to have elicited in Coates a sense of possibility. . . . He is using his position of prominence and moral authority to draw attention to the plight of Palestinians.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Ta-Nehisi Coates always writes with a purpose, so naming his latest collection The Message is nothing if not on-brand. But what’s the actual message? Consisting of three pieces of nonfiction, the book is part memoir, part travelogue, and part writing primer. . . . These pilgrimages, for him, help ground his powerful writing about race.”—Associated Press

“The Message marks Coates’s first nonfiction book in nearly a decade, and it arrives at a critical flashpoint in our increasingly globalized society.”—Harper’s Bazaar

“An earnest and intimate exploration of locations of extreme injustice, and of the power of writing to render a more compassionate—and more honest—future . . . At once a rallying cry and a love letter to writing itself, the book is an urgent reminder that ‘politics is the art of the possible, but art creates the possible of politics.’”—Oprah Daily

“Ever since his Baldwin-inflected Between the World and Me, Coates has been known for his incisive (and sometimes uncomfortable) cultural and political commentary. Here he journeys from West Africa to the American South to Palestine to examine how the stories we tell can fail us, and to argue that only the truth can bring justice.”—The Boston Globe

“With his signature incisiveness, Coates interrogates the intersections of race, power, and identity while blending historical insight and personal reflection. Through three essays, Coates presents a global perspective that challenges the status quo and dares us to envision a more just future.”—SheReads

“With the game-changing success of his essay/memoir Between the World and Me, anything [Coates] writes will immediately command attention. Here he grapples with the power and danger of storytelling, the too easy way of shaping and softening reality.”—Parade

“Brilliant and timely.”—Booklist, starred review

“A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Searching and restless, The Message is filled with startling revelations that show a writer grappling with how his work fits into history and the present moment. These masterful essays will leave readers convinced that Coates is up to the task.”—BookPage, starred review

“This is an incendiary shot fired over the bow of America’s mainstream journalistic establishment.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review Expand reviews