#1 National Bestseller New York Times Bestseller The renowned author of Between the World and Me journeys to three resonant sites of conflict to explore how the stories we tell and the ones we don't shape our realities. Ta-Nehisi Coates always writes with a purpose. . .. These pilgrimages, for him, help ground his powerful writing about race. Associated Press Coates exhorts readers, including students, parents, educators, and journalists, to challenge conventional narratives that can be used to justify ethnic cleansing or camouflage racist policing. Brilliant and timely. Booklist (starred review) Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, in the tradition of or wells classic Politics and the English Language, but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking expose and distort our realities. In the first of the books three intertwining essays, Coates, on his first trip to Africa, finds himself in two places at once in Dakar, a modern city in Senegal, and in a mythic kingdom in his mind. Then he takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on his own books banning, but also explores the larger backlash to the nations…