The beautiful struggle

Summary: Paul Coates was an enigmatic god to his sons: a Vietnam vet who rolled with the Black Panthers, an old-school disciplinarian and new-age believer in free love, an autodidact who launched a publishing company in his basement dedicated to telling the true history of African civilization. Most of all, he was a wily tactician whose mission was to carry his sons through inner-city adolescence--and through Baltimore in the Age of Crack--and into the safe arms of Howard University, where he worked so his children could attend for free. Among his brood of seven, his main challenges were Ta-Nehisi, spacy and sensitive and almost comically miscalibrated for his environment, and Big Bill, charismatic and all-too-ready for the challenges of the streets. This book follows their divergent paths, and their father's steadfast efforts to keep them whole in a world that seemed bent on their destruction.--From publisher description.

Record details

ISBN: 0385527462
ISBN: 9780385527460
ISBN: 0385520360
ISBN: 9780385520362
ISBN: 0385526849
ISBN: 9780385526845
Physical Description: 1 online resource (223) : map
remote
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: New York : Spiegel & Grau, 2008.

Content descriptions

Restrictions on Access Note:	Restrictions unspecified
Reproduction Note:	Electronic reproduction. [S.l.] : HathiTrust Digital Library, 2010.
System Details Note:	Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212
Action Note:	digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve
Source of Description Note:	Print version record.