I found this overall to be pretty disappointing. Coates is a really wonderful writer, and I will be rushing to read his fiction for sure. But as a non-fiction piece, I found this overly long and quite rambly, without much structure or direction. 

 It's worth keeping in mind that this is supposed to be a letter from the author to his son, so there is not really the amount of exposition or explanation for the reader that you might expect from an essay. I read this with some American friends, and realised that I missed a lot of what Coates was doing, playing with stereotypes and talking about classism and racism in America. I wouldn't really recommend this to a non-US reader, I think it's a bit too US-centric to get much out of unless you are particularly familiar with regional tropes and stereotypes in the US.