We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

This is in the top half of my 5 star rated books.

Phenomenal on multiple levels:

1. I learned a ton. Ta-Nehisi combines shocking, brutal, harrowing storytelling with incredibly well researched data and explanations of systems of discrimination.
2. He comes across as deeply passionate, highly knowledgeable, direct, sensitive, introspective and driven. His attitude is an inspiring example of someone committed to passionate, powerful work.
3. The writing in this book is sublime. It's evident that he's invested a lot of effort researching and honing his writing style, influenced by rap and poetry. There are some breathtaking chapter ending sentences with words carefully selected to hit home powerfully.
4. Surprisingly, the abnormal structure of this book worked really well. There are 8 long-form articles (I think one per year that he wrote for The Atlantic?) deep diving into topics like Reparations, and President Obama. Each article is prefaced with ~10 pages where he gives a quite personal feeling retrospective on where his life was at when he wrote the article, and additional context around it. It provided a nice rhythm and contrast between the carefully written articles and the more personal tone of the retrospectives. Broke the book up nicely into chunks, too.

I preferred this to Between The World And Me. The topics of the articles were super interesting and content was fantastic.

P.S. The paperback copy is of very high production quality, lovely feel. And it's set in a beautiful typeface—the fancy custom Qu is cool!