Book of essays, with one from each year of Obama's presidency, as well as short essays commenting on each of those essays. In his commentary, Coates actually apologized for some of his earlier essays. A while back I read a review by Darryl Pinckney of this book complaining that Coates is too pessimistic and not activist enough; I'm not sure where that take came from. He's writing and speaking about the centrality of racism & white supremacy in America, and the importance of acknowledging that centrality before we can solve our problems. I didn't take his pessimism to mean Coates is giving up, or telling everyone else to; it seemed to me that he was saying the fight we must fight would never end. Perhaps I'm just reading optimism into his work. At first I was put off a bit by Coates's attempts to coin new terms, or new uses for words--"plunder", for instance. But thinking about it, I realized that he is using these terms to indicate concepts for which there is no widely accepted term. He uses "Plunder" to refer to white-supremacist exactions on black people both profit- & power-motivated. "The Grey Wastes" already have a term: "the Prison-Industrial Complex" but I can understand the urge to think of something catchier.