We Were Eight Years in Power, the new book by Ta-Nehisi Coates, is not precisely new. It’s a collection of eight articles Coates wrote for the Atlantic, starting in 2007 during Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, concluding this year with the start of Donald Trump’s administration, and including some of Coates’s greatest hits, including his much-lauded 2014 article “The Case for Reparations.” What’s new is that each of the eight articles isintroduced by an essay in which Coates lays out its context: what was happening in America when he wrote it, and what was happening in his own development as a writer.

Ultimately, those two narrative arcs form the spine of the book. In We Were Eight Years in Power, you can see America at first embracing the policy of a black president and then reacting in a violent and paranoid racist backlash, and you can see Coates developing both the theoretical tools and the lyrical, expressive voice that makes his analysis of that backlash so captivating.

“I could hear what that voice sounded like in my head,” Coates writes of the voice he was aiming for as he profiled Michelle Obama. “It was a blues with a beat dirtier than anything I had ever heard anywhere in the world.” He didn’t, he concludes, capture such a voice in the profile, but as you read We Were Eight Years in Power, you’ll hear Coates incrementally refine and clarify his distinctive voice — steeped in poetry and hip-hop and the rhetoric of black liberation — into the formidable tool it’s become today.

[For more on this story by Constance Grady, go to https://www.vox.com/culture/20...ears-in-power-review]