Read this when you are in a reflective mood. 
 (I had been hearing about this but didn't get around to reading it until it was Oak Park's One Book, One City pick). 
 Once I started reading, I looked up and read his award-winning essay for The Atlantic, "A Case for Reparations." The Atlantic essay is a nice compliment to his book, which itself is like one long essay; both speak about the ingrained racism in America's history. In the book he speaks about police brutality against blacks, in the Atlantic essay he mostly talks about ghettos and housing. 
 In Part One he makes some claims that I can see people having an issue with, like "the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white..." It's a few parts like these that make him sound angry, but anger has it's part in this, it should. 
 I like reading about his time at Howard University. He names a lot of black writers that he studied--most of them I have not heard of, and I admit I did not look them up. (Maybe someday). I'm glad I had to read Malcolm X's book in high school; Coates refers to his college self as a "Malcolmite." 
 This deceptively slim book is packed with food for thought. It is short but not fast. This is NOT a quick read. More often than not I stopped at the end of a paragraph and thought about what he was trying to say. Coates's writing is lofty, and metaphorical. There are many good talking points, many worthy quotes, so much packed in. Above all, he seems to me like a seeker of justice and a truth-seeker. As he essentially says, he's looking for an explanation. He's originally from Baltimore, "from one of those cities where everyday life was so different than the Dream that it demanded an explanation."