Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

The Message

The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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My first book of 2025 (I actually began reading it on 12/30/24) and it Is a doozy. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Message is primarily interested in the ways that language shapes power and resistance. The introductory section, “Journalism Is Not a Luxury,” addresses just that: the essential role in language and journalism, recording history, in fighting injustice. Coates addresses an unnamed “you” in this section, but this part seems to serve as a thesis statement about writing: “You cannot act upon what you cannot see. And […]

Three-Four-One

The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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Despite the backlash due to Coates’ writing and speeches on his time in Palestine, there are really three narratives in this travelogue. The Palestine one is the third one and it’s the one I’m going to spend as little time as possible on because I don’t want this page to be a forum on what’s happening there right now. I actually think the best essay here is the first one, where Coates finds himself in Dakar, Senegal. He has written at length about the rejection […]

beautifully written, tough to get through but so worthwhile

The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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CW: this is about slavery, so…all the requisite warnings therein I put this book off for a long time–a really long time, judging from how far back in my Kindle I had to go to find it. And I’m ashamed to admit, I started reading it because I was basically done with everything else I had on my Kindle and was looking for something, anything to read (as per Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour one must always have reading material on the […]

A fantastical twist on the slave narrative

The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates turns the slave narrative on its head. With his first fiction novel, Coates deftly melds together historical fiction with sci-fi fantasy. The novel follows the life of Hiram who we meet when he nearly drowns in the local river. Hiram is born a slave on a Virginia plantation, the son of the master. A story that’s all too common in history. His father made Hiram help his brother with his studies. Hiram has to hold his tongue and go […]

“The craft of writing as the art of thinking”

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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I did not want to finish this book, because I knew I’d then have to write a review, and I don’t know if I can do Between the World and Me justice. This short National Book Award winner from 2015 by Ta-Nehisi Coates is a three-part letter to the author’s (then) 15-year-old son, Samori Coates. It was written shortly after the killer of Michael Brown was acquitted, inspired by his son’s reaction to the injustice, and is Coates’s paean and lament about the truths of […]

We Were Eight Years in Power – Ta-Nehisi Coates (2017)

We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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I thought about the rating for this book a few different ways and for a few different extended moments. In addition, I also thought about whether I wanted to read this book at all. Now in 2021, especially after the election, I feel a little more emotional settled to process some of the thoughts and feelings I had during the course of this book. In addition, I think I’d read almost all these pieces as they came out or most of them. So for one, […]



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