The beautiful struggle : a memoir Cover Image

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The beautiful struggle : a memoir / Ta-Nehisi Coates.

ISBN: 9780385527460
ISBN: 0385527462
Physical Description: 227 pages : map ; 21 cm
Edition: Trade paperback edition.
Publisher: New York : Spiegel &amp; Grau, 2009.
Copyright: &copy;2008

Summary:

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 through inner-city adolescence--and through 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, spacy and sensitive and almost comically miscalibrated for his environment, and Big Bill, charismatic and all-too-ready for the challenges of the streets. This book follows their divergent paths, and their father's steadfast efforts to keep them whole in a world that seemed bent on their destruction.--From publisher description.