Morning Coffee Book Club

Read on the Edge with the new  Morning Coffee Book Club.  Join us for a discussion of Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates at 10:00 a.m. in the Cornelia White Community Room at the Welwood Murray Memorial Library.

The WMML Book Club meets on the third Wednesday of the month at 10:00 a.m. at the Welwood Murray Memorial Library and is open to everyone. Members of the club read the selected book for the month, then join in lively discussions. Please click here to see a list of future selections for the WMML Book Club.

Refreshments are generously provided by Aspen Mills Bakery. Thank you, Aspen Mills!

January 18, 2017

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates** 

—#1 New York Times Bestseller

—Winner of the National Book Award

—Winner of the NAACP Image Award

—Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

—Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award

In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden?

Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.