Few writers have seemed as aware of the hazards of professional opinion-mongering as Ta-Nehisi Coates. “Columns are where great journalists go to die,” he once wrote. “Unmoored from the rigors of actually making calls and expending shoe leather,

In his first nonfiction book in a decade, Coates reflects on what he learned while visiting three different places: Senegal, South Carolina and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

The word “terrorist” makes one appearance in the entirety of The Message, and it is preceded by the word “Zionist.” Coates spends his time lamenting the myths of 1948. Though Coates is unconcerned about the thousands of Palestinian murders of Jews,