We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Between the World and Me, winner of the National Book Award. . A MacArthur “Genius Grant” fellow, Coates has received the National Magazine Award, the Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journal

 Praise for Ta-Nehisi Coates and Between the World and Me “I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Now Ta-Nehisi Coates explores the tragic echoes of that history in our own time: the unprecedented election of a black president followed by a vicious backlash that fueled the election of the man Coates argues is America’s “first white president.” But the story of these present-day eight years is not just about presidential politics. Coates powerfully examines the events of the Obama era from his intimate and revealing perspective—the point of view of a young writer who begins the journey in an unemployment office in Harlem and ends it in the Oval Office, interviewing a president.We Were Eight Years in Power features Coates’s iconic essays first published in The Atlantic, including “Fear of a Black President,” “The Case for Reparations,” and “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” along with eight fresh essays that revisit each year of the Obama administration through Coates’s own experiences, observations, and intellectual development, capped by a bracingly original assessment of the election that fully illuminated the tra

Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates.”—Toni Morrison“Powerful a searing meditation on what it means to be black in America today.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times“Brilliant Coates is firing on all cylinders.”—The Washington Post“Urgent, lyrical, and devastating a new classic of our time.”—Vogue“A crucial book during this moment of generational awakening.”—The New Yorker“Titanic and timely essential reading.”—Entertainment Weekly. Praise for Ta-Nehisi Coates and Between the