RaveThe Financial TimesThis theme — Coates’s awakening to the elemental nature of racism and white supremacy to the American project — emerges over the course of the eight pieces collected in We Were Eight Years in Power, one from each year of the Obama presidency ...linked together by introductory essays that add autobiographical context; we follow the parallel tracks of Coates’s rapid rise from the unemployment line to the heights of American letters and his simultaneous and profound loss of hope ...is about Coates finding his voice, refining the oracular style that would explode across the cultural firmament around the midpoint of Obama’s presidency.
Gary Younge
PositiveThe Financial Times...a slow-burning indictment of US gun culture ... Some of the portraits suffer from the simple fact that their subjects did not have the chance to live full lives, while others are sparse given the reluctance of family members to be interviewed. But Younge elicits compelling reactions from the many relatives he speaks to ... Younge — in a book that feels both timely and utterly, hopelessly timeless — holds few illusions that there won’t be many more [deaths].
