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We Were Eight Years in Power
- An American Tragedy
- Narrated by: Beresford Bennett
- Length: 13 hrs and 38 mins
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We Were Eight Years in Power
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Summary
Penguin presents the audiobook edition of We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates, read by Beresford Bennett.
From 2008-2016, the leader of the free world was a black man. Obama's presidency reshaped America and transformed the international conversation around politics, race and equality. But it attracted criticism and bred discontent as much as it inspired hope - so much so that the world now faces an uncertain future under a very different kind of US President.
In this essential new book, peerless journalist and thinker Ta-Nehisi Coates takes stock of the Obama era, speaking authoritatively from political, ideological and cultural perspectives, and drawing a sophisticated and penetrating portrait of America today.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- R G PATTERSON
- 05-07-20
Sheer brilliance
Superb book and in light of the blm protests in June 2020 it's the right time to remind oneself how the odds are stacked (and have been stacked) against African Americans!!
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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- OneKey Gadgets
- 29-04-20
Brilliant and well written
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a brilliant writer and speaker, one of the best writer and thinkers of our time on race and politics.
His most recent book The Water Dancer at the time of writing this review is another master piece
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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- Sue
- 16-11-17
An honest look at the Obama years
The simplest way to describe “We Were Eight Years in Power” is as a selection of Ta-Nehisi Coates' most influential pieces from The Atlantic, organised chronologically. The book is actually far more than that, establishing Coates as the pre-eminent black public intellectual of his generation.
Coates is one of the first to show up to discuss all three contemporary themes: the man, the community, national identity. He critiques respectability politics. He writes about mass incarceration. He writes about Michelle Obama and Chicago's South Side. He writes about how Barack Obama was exceptional, in many senses, and about the paradoxical limits of the first black president's power to address race and racism. He writes about the qualitative difference between white economic prospects and black economic prospects, thanks to discriminatory policies promulgated by the government even during progressive times, and about how, in his view, reparations would be the only way to redress the problem.
An air of resignation begins to bleed into Coates' writing even before his last essay, coming into the final years of the Obama administration. It is an eloquent eulogy to the struggles that African Americans are facing and increasingly fearing today.
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4 people found this helpful