RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksThe essays gathered in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s latest book, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy, demand that we see the black-American experience as not incidental but central to the founding stories that makes America possible ... Coates’s writing is consistently nuanced and precise, always limited to what the writer can pull out of his own story, out of another’s, out of the archives, or out of a database ...provide a too-rare peek into the processes of a first-rate mind conversing with itself and of a man writing his way to greatness ... This book will not provide all of us with resolutions to the United States’s woes. But it is one essential modern work for a complete understanding of the American democratic process, because it is central to American storytelling.
