The young James Joyce of the hip-hop generation.
- Walter Mosley,
A kind of hip-hop <i>Portrait of the Artist</i>.
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
A beautifully written, loving portrait of a strong father bringing his sons to manhood.
Booklist
Haunting and healing . a splendid memoir.
Essence
The single best writer on the subject of race in the United States.
New York Observer
A remarkable, blunt portrait of an adolescence filled with danger, chaos, flaws, and tragedy . a love story, dispatched from the frontlines of a family.
Time Out New York
The intellectual heir to James Baldwin.
Financial Times
Told in a dreamy, lyric register redolent of a voiceover in a movie flashback, <i>The Beautiful Struggle</i> is both a touching portrait of filial affection and a paean to the redemptive power of culture.
Prospect
One of the most high-profile commentators on race in the United States ...Reading this book is an intoxicating experience
- Bernardine Evaristo, New Statesman
This book forces us to ask how far American society has really come, and how much further it has to go.
Financial Times
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.