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In The Message, the renowned author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates discusses multiple provocative topics with an intimate and subjective viewpoint that is informed by deeply introspective memories of his past as well as by his (present day) travels around the world to places which are deeply connected to the topics he is exploring. The result is reminiscent of an Anthony Bourdain travelogue in that Coates is trying to understand the people he is encountering by partaking in their history, culture, and ideas, but also in that his deeper goals are to comprehend the ways of the world in general and—perhaps most elusively of all—himself.

In addition to being a travelogue and a personal history, The Message is also written in the style of an open letter, or epistolary. Starting in Chapter 1, it offers advice to an unnamed audience in the manner of James Baldwin and Martin Luther King, Jr. before him, and which Coates himself used in his most acclaimed work, Between the World and Me (“A Letter to My Son”) in 2015. In Chapter 1, Coates’s audience is ostensibly aspiring writers and journalists. However, it can be reasonably assumed that Coates is extending his message beyond that narrow group to a wider audience of anyone interested in understanding the truths of our complicated world.

Read more about the use of the epistolary style by Coates and other authors in other works.

An example of how this melding of styles plays out in The Message is when Coates discusses his earliest experiences with lyrics and reading and applies them to the advice that he gives to young writers in the first chapter. Coates, in turn, uses many metaphors and turns-of-phrase to connect the touchstones of his personal life to the experiences that he describes while traveling.

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