Book Cover Image of We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Publication Date: Oct 03, 2017
List Price: $28.00
Format: Hardcover, 400 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9780399590566
Imprint: One World
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Parent Company: Bertelsmann

Hardcover Description:

A sweeping collection of new and selected essays on the Obama era by the National Book Award winning author of Between the World and Me

Huit ans au pouvoir by Ta-Nehisi Coates Coates chose to publish the French edition of We Were Eight Years in Power with the the oldest independent Black owned publisher in the world, Présence Africaine Editions.
We were eight years in power was the lament of Reconstruction-era black politicians as the American experiment in multiracial democracy ended with the return of white supremacist rule in the South. 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. This book also examines the new voices, ideas, and movements for justice that emerged over this period—and the effects of the persistent, haunting shadow of our nation’s old and unreconciled history. 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 tragedy of the Obama era. We Were Eight Years in Power is a vital account of modern America, from one of the definitive voices of this historic moment.



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