Hello and welcome to the Audio Book Club for the month of September 2015.

I'm Katie Waldman, Slate's Words Correspondent, and I'm joined in the DC studio today by our chief political writer, the exceptional Jamel Bowie.

Hi, Jamel.

Hello, Katie.

And we're really lucky to have the brilliant writer, critic, and audiobook club stalwart, Megan O'Rourke, calling in from London. Hi, Megan. Hi. We'll be talking today about Tanaasi Coates'es between the world and me. This is a huge book, and it has reverberated hugely. It takes the form of a six-chapter letter from Coates to his 15-year-old son, Sammerie, written in the wake of the announcement that

police officer Darren Wilson would not be indicted for murdering an unarmed teenager Michael

Brown and Ferguson, Missouri. I'm going to quote a bit from Jack Hamilton's lovely review in

slate. After noting that the inspirational figure behind the letter conceit is James Baldwin,

who opened the fire next time

with a similar missive to his nephew, Hamilton writes,

Between the World and Me is not so much a work of counsel as a lovingly, painstakingly crafted

inheritance. If Coates' first book, The Beautiful Struggle, was Coates explaining his father

to himself, between the world and Me is Coates explaining

himself to his son, and in doing so, explaining as best he can what it means to be black in America.

So I thought this was a really beautiful capsule summary, but let me turn it over to you, Jamel.

What is your capsule summary of Between the World and Me?

I think that comes very close to what mine is, which is that this is a book.

It's not just sort of what being black in America means to coach, but it's also sort of

trying to explain the visceral experience of being black in America.

What the sort of persistent and through time prevailing feeling of physical insecurity has meant to what it's meant to be black and how that is shaped Coates's sort of beliefs about himself, how it shaped his like basic ontology of the world, and how he thinks it should inform his son's experience of the world as his son

goes out into adulthood.

Megan, do you have a capsule summary?

...