Sukhdev Sandhu's Review. Dina Seremet, Sabrina Shao, Matt Tung, Mikayla Coyne, Madeleine Perko, Kamille Martin

Sukhdev Sandhu is able to not only provide feedback regarding the novel, Between the World and Me, but is also able to provide more context about who Ta-Nehisi Coates is and what he is doing today. Sandhu does this through offering context, assessment, and description. Examples of context include when Sandu offers extensive background into who Coates is as a person and what he has done in the past. He does this by stating, “for the young Ta-Nehisi Coates, growing up in Baltimore, it was also a time of mystification and shame. Watching newsreel footage of the civil rights movement, he got the impression that ‘the black people in these films seemed to love the worst things in life – love the dogs that rent their children apart, the tear gas that clawed at their lungs, the firehouses that tore off their clothes and tumbled them into their streets.” Sandhu is able to provide context throughout the entire review, and is able to back up the different points he makes throughout the piece. Sandhu explains Coates’ reasoning for why he writes the novel the way he did, as a letter to his son. Coates continues to provide context by explaining what he believes is the American Dream. “The Dream is something Coates often invokes and damns as psychically disfiguring.” This ‘dream’ as he explains is ‘perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways … treehouses and the cub scouts. The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake’. The Dream is an important aspect of Coates’ writing that seems to always be brought back up. Sandhu uses direct evidence from Between the World and Me to analyze the various points that Coates makes with each passage from the review.  The assessment is then incorporated into the review, by Sandhu incorporating his own words into the situation. This review is not entirely made up of Coates’ passages and then Sandhu analyzing them to make sense of what his point is, but he is able to incorporate more current events and his perspective. Several examples of where Sandhu offers assessment in the review are shown when he writes “many of the ideas Coates rehearses here are associated with the school of thought known as Afro-pessimism”. Another example is “it appears at a moment when, thanks to mobile phones and social media, the ghastly spectacle of black Americans – many of them young and unarmed – being strangled, clubbed or shot by police officers has created a cacophony calling for change”. Sandhu continues to assess the novel as he writes “In 2015, Coates is a more exalted writer, but his prose seems increasingly ventriloquised and his insistence on Afro-American exceptionalism a kind of parochialism”. This is an example of Sandhu interpreting Coates’ writing and assessing it based on his own beliefs. Sandhu then provides detailed description throughout the review, “these are all forceful claims – ones made with a characteristic pivoting towards the (male) black body and the frequent use of words such as ‘plunder’ or ‘shackle’. They are accompanied by vivid recollections of being raised in gang-ridden West Baltimore where the local lads’ uproarious nihilism is ascribed to the knowledge that ‘we could not get out’ and that ‘the ground we walked was tripwired’. 

Overall, Sandhu is able to provide context, assessment, and description, which allows the audience to gain a better understanding about Coates’ past, along with providing exceptional analysis to the passages and points in which Coates makes throughout the novel.