The Warmth of Other Suns - Isabel Wilkerson
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration - Isabel Wilkerson
Non-Fiction
Pages: 622
This book tells the story of America's Great Migration, the one group of migrants that history has paid relatively little attention to: the movement of over four million black Americans from the South to the urban centres of the North from World War 1 to the mid 1960s, fleeing prejudice, lynching, Jim Crow laws and a white caste that was determined to keep blacks in a state little different to slavery.
It tells the story primarily through three individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, a sharecropper's daughter, who left Mississippi for Chicago in the 30s; George Starling, an fruit picker, who left Florida for New York in the 40s; and Robert Pershing Foster, a young doctor, who left Louisiana for Los Angeles in the 50s. All three were the descendants of slaves, and all three managed to make more of their lives than they could ever have done back home in the segregated South.
It is fascinating and touching and heartbreaking to read about their struggles, these real people, who fought against racism their whole lives, who escaped the South for the chance of a better life for themselves and their children, and who found that the North wasn't quite the promised land they believed it to be.
The writing is beautiful, and you really feel the care and affection Wilkerson feels for her subjects - as she much naturally have felt after spending so long with them and sharing so many intimate details of their lives. I feel like I know these people, their hopes and dreams and fears, and I was sorry to come to the end of the book and leave them behind.
Non-Fiction
Pages: 622
This book tells the story of America's Great Migration, the one group of migrants that history has paid relatively little attention to: the movement of over four million black Americans from the South to the urban centres of the North from World War 1 to the mid 1960s, fleeing prejudice, lynching, Jim Crow laws and a white caste that was determined to keep blacks in a state little different to slavery.
It tells the story primarily through three individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, a sharecropper's daughter, who left Mississippi for Chicago in the 30s; George Starling, an fruit picker, who left Florida for New York in the 40s; and Robert Pershing Foster, a young doctor, who left Louisiana for Los Angeles in the 50s. All three were the descendants of slaves, and all three managed to make more of their lives than they could ever have done back home in the segregated South.
It is fascinating and touching and heartbreaking to read about their struggles, these real people, who fought against racism their whole lives, who escaped the South for the chance of a better life for themselves and their children, and who found that the North wasn't quite the promised land they believed it to be.
The writing is beautiful, and you really feel the care and affection Wilkerson feels for her subjects - as she much naturally have felt after spending so long with them and sharing so many intimate details of their lives. I feel like I know these people, their hopes and dreams and fears, and I was sorry to come to the end of the book and leave them behind.