The Beautiful Struggle

The Beautiful Struggle:A Memoir

  • Paperback

A small and beautiful epic of growing up in 1980s Baltimore, from the author of Between the World and Me

The Beautiful Struggle is an extraordinary memoir from the most important new voice in the US race debate and the author of New York Times bestseller list no. 1 Between the World and Me, hailed by Toni Morrison as “required reading.”

This small and perfectly formed epic follows the lives of boys on the journey to manhood in black America and beyond in 1980s Baltimore, a city on the verge of chaos. These youngsters needed to learn fast, and Ta-Nehisi’s father, Paul, was a fine teacher: a Vietnam vet who rolled with the Black Panthers, an old-school disciplinarian, and an autodidact who launched a publishing company in his basement. The Beautiful Struggle is a moving father-and-son story about the reality that tests us, and the love that saves us.

Reviews

  • The young James Joyce of the hip-hop generation.

    Walter Mosley
  • A kind of hip-hop Portrait of the Artist.

    Guardian
  • A moving father-and-son story … an intense portrait of those whom the black revolution left behind, but who never broke faith with its tenets.

    New York Review of Books