Between the World and Me

Framed as a letter to his teenage son, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s National Book Award winner is a searching meditation on race and the body in America. He writes about the physical reality of living in a Black body, the history pressed onto it, and the fears a father cannot fully protect a son from. Spare and unflinching, part memoir and part essay, it became a defining book of its moment, and one Jack Dorsey names among those that influenced him most.