Deft. Detailed. Deep.

I am no stranger to the words of Ta-Nehisi Coates. I read his articles in The Atlantic before he caught people’s attention with Between the World and Me in 2015. His challenging essays have been instrumental in the evolution of my own beliefs and practices. I have long appreciated his ability to be a provocative truth-teller while also navigating changes to his own principles and perspectives. Much like Hanif Abdurraqib, Coates is a thoughtful, intentional writer who refused to be enamored with (much less distracted by) his own profundity.

In The Message, he brings his formidable skills through three distinct, yet increasingly interlocked themes: His first trip to his family’s ancestral homeland of Senegal, his reckoning with organizations trying to ban his books and others like them, and his first trip to occupied Palestine in 2024. With the first essay, Coates does what he does best – live in the narrative tension of reckoning with his experiences. He enjoys the experience; from the people he meets and the food he eats to his sight-seeing, deep conversations, and more. But he never feels settled, and he talks openly about that frustration.

In his second essay, he talks candidly about his journey as a writer of note in American letters, while also bemoaning the culture of racism, homophobia, and hatred that fuels the current rampage of book banning. But after a few years of not getting more involved than denouncing book banners in interviews and on social media, he reflects on the first time he visited teachers in South Carolina who were trying to prevent his books from being removed from a high school AP English curriculum. Finally, he bares his soul while discussing his visit to Palestine and Israel. Using a variety of on-the-ground experts to guide his travels, Coates treks to a wide range of sites throughout the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem, each of them proving more eye-opening, heart-breaking and myth-destroying than the last.

While The Message might be his newest book, it instantly became the one I will recommend to people who are interested in reading Coates’ work.