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What makes this book, as well as, his previous book, The Beautiful Struggle, so important is the perspective from which Ta-nehisi speaks. Like him, I myself am a black male Gen Xer. For most of my young life I heard about the statistics regarding my kind dying at a young age. It was an ever present feeling that you either get caught up in the madness surrounding you or somehow escape to the other side that was just a Metro ride away. This book is important because, whether you agree with it …

Inspired by James Baldwin’s 1963 classic “The Fire Next Time,” Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book, “Between the World and Me,” is a searing meditation on what it means to be black in America today. It takes the form of a letter from Mr. Coates to his 14-year-old son, Samori, and speaks of the perils of living in a country where unarmed black men and boys — Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Walter L. Scott, Freddie Gray — are dying at the hands of police officers, an America where just last month …