PositiveThe New YorkerHe does not offer comfort, which would feel, to him, dishonest, and instead sets out to explore the question of how to 'live free in this black body.' To Coates, a defining feature of black life is that your body can be taken from you easily, and with little consequence ... Coates writes extensively about the vulnerability of the black body, but he only briefly alludes to the additional ways black women’s bodies are vulnerable to sexual and physical violence. To his credit, he does not presume to be an expert on black women’s experiences, but his reluctance to interrogate them further feels odd for a narrator who is otherwise insatiably curious ... Looking forward, Between the World and Me feels like a crucial book during this moment of generational awakening. In Coates’s work, racism not only disembodies but it is disembodied itself. Nowadays we love a loud racist but Coates turns away from such sensational stories and focusses instead on the slow violence of institutional racism.