Excerpt from The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

And so I delved deeper—hoping for some insight into the mindset of a man who had permanently crippled another. I'd like to tell you I found some great revelation here, but the book was mostly filled with stories of Tatum's only vaguely interesting football career. I recall Tatum writing that the hit on Stingley was unremarkable in its violence. If a reader came, as I did, looking for some profound meditations on a catastrophe, it was not to be found. And so I was left again to grapple on my own—no Google, no Wikipedia, no social network through which to commiserate with others. Just me and this terrible story of an acrobat entombed in his own body playing over and over in the back of my mind.

Excerpted from The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Copyright © 2024 by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Excerpted by permission of One World. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.