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A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood
Spiegel & Grau
May 2008
On Sale: May 6, 2008
240 pages
ISBN: 0385520360
EAN: 9780385520362
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
An exceptional father-son story about the reality that
tests us, the myths that sustain us, and the love that
saves us. 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 across the shoals of inner-
city adolescence—and through the collapsing civilization of
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, spacey and sensitive and almost comically
miscalibrated for his environment, and Big Bill,
charismatic and all-too-ready for the challenges of the
streets. The Beautiful Struggle follows their divergent
paths through this turbulent period, and their father’s
steadfast efforts—assisted by mothers, teachers, and a body
of myths, histories, and rituals conjured from the past to
meet the needs of a troubled present—to keep them whole in
a world that seemed bent on their destruction. With a remarkable ability to reimagine both the lost world
of his father’s generation and the terrors and wonders of
his own youth, Coates offers readers a small and beautiful
epic about boys trying to become men in black America and
beyond.
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