Charts Coates’s re-entry as a public intellectual; it also marks a shift in his approach. Instead of focusing mainly on the American experience, most of the book takes place abroad ... Instead of being the singular voice or the incomparable expert, Coates offers himself as an ally.
A generous reading might interpret Coates’s self-exposure as a lure for drawing readers into communion with his narrative of intellectual and emotional discovery ... He doesn’t engage with Senegalese writing or music at all ... Coates is equally disappointing in the Middle East ... This isn’t a takedown. Coates’s missed opportunities don’t suggest diminished talent or cultural significance. He’s taken important risks here even though they haven’t all played out profitably ... Takes a half step toward task fulfillment. Perhaps Coates’s future projects will hit full stride.
Coates’s dismissal of complication amplifies the certainty of the book’s title, which, given the biblical landscape of the book’s second half, appears to allude to the fierce truth-telling of the prophets. Coates seems almost to put himself on that plane ... To absorb the rest of the essay, to reread and reread it, is to sense that his rendering of his experience inside Yad Vashem is strategic as well as sincere, a means of inoculating himself against charges of insensitivity or worse as he becomes purely polemical and takes up, without any complication, the Palestinian anti-colonial narrative ... Willful blind spots ... Coates’s candor is riveting ... Purity of argument is Coates’s desire; complexity, his self-declared enemy. In this, in his refusal to wrestle with conflicting realities, the essay feels desperate. It feels devoid of the layers and depths of the most profound moral writing.
Personal and introspective ... Filled with startling revelations that show a writer grappling with how his work fits into history and the present moment. Coates believes that writing can change the world. Achieving this mission is arduous, vital and necessary. These masterful essays will leave readers convinced that Coates is up to the task.
Coates presents three blazing essays on race, moral complicity, and a storyteller’s responsibility to the truth ... Coates exhorts readers, including students, parents, educators, and journalists, to challenge conventional narratives that can be used to justify ethnic cleansing or camouflage racist policing. Brilliant and timely.