The Message

Coates's first nonfiction book since Between the World and Me trades the domestic focus of his earlier work for three linked travel essays — on Dakar, on book bans in a South Carolina classroom, and on a ten-day visit to Israel and the occupied West Bank. That last section became the book's flashpoint: reviewers split sharply over whether Coates's decision to compress a complex, decades-long conflict into a short visit and a moral framework borrowed from Jim Crow produces clarifying moral urgency or evades inconvenient complexity. The Dakar and South Carolina sections, concerned with narrative and who controls it, drew more consensus praise for lucidity. It's a book that argues nonfiction should function like literature — with all the vulnerabilities that entails.