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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 adolescenceβand through the collapsing civilization of Baltimore in the Age of Crackβand 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 fatherβs steadfast effortsβassisted by mothers, teachers, and a body of myths, histories, and rituals conjured from the past to meet the needs of a troubled presentβto keep them whole in a world that seemed bent on their destruction. With a remarkable ability to reimagine both the lost world of his fatherβs 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.
 Media BuzzTalk of the Nation - July 2, 2008
News and Notes - May 28, 2008
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