How long does it take to read The Beautiful Struggle?
A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood
The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nehisi Coates takes about 4 hours 33 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 4 hours 33 minutes
A weekend read
First published 2001. 248 pages, about 68,200 words.
10 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 7 hours 35 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 4 hours 33 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours 51 minutes |
The page count is the median across 11 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
An exceptional father-son story about the reality that tests us, the myths that sustain us, and the love that saves us.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 across the shoals of inner-city adolescence--and through the collapsing civilization of 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, spacey and sensitive and almost comically miscalibrated for his environment, and Big Bill, charismatic and all-too-ready for the challenges of the streets. The Beautiful Struggle follows their divergent paths through this turbulent period, and their father's steadfast efforts--assisted by mothers, teachers, and a body of myths, histories, and rituals conjured from the past to meet the needs of a troubled present--to keep them whole in a world that seemed bent on their destruction. With a remarkable ability to reimagine both the lost world of his father's generation and the terrors and wonders of his own youth, Coates offers readers a small and beautiful epic about boys trying to become men in black America and beyond.
Subjects: Fathers and sons, Biography & Autobiography, Nonfiction, Street life, Social conditions, African Americans
