We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

The introductions are valuable even if you read some or all of the Atlantic essays when they were written. In particular the reparations and mass incarceration essays merit close reading that is more practical in a book than in a magazine. I think in 2021 Coates' effect on national politics on the basis of these essays may even be underrated. In part because he has consciously stepped back from continuing to make the argument and others have picked up his work and carried it forward. But he got these arguments into one of the biggest megaphones pointed at the liberal elite world. He acknowledges the many debts to the prior work of others and the way that his platform allowed him to amplify and present the observations they had made before, in ways they were not given the same opportunity to do. But from his perch, he made terrific use of it.

I started by skipping the Cosby and Michelle Obama and Malcolm X essays, but then I went back and read it all. Those are not as good as the rest, particularly Cosby (a failure as an essay, he admits, but a success as a first step to more writing at that magazine). It is interesting to track his growth as a writer instead of only having a book of his most refined work.