The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (utgåvan 2010)

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson is a 2010 Random House publication.

Exceptional!

It is seldom that a nonfiction book, one detailing an incredible amount detailed history, is both densely informative and compulsively readable.

This is my ‘Black History Month’ read- and I can honestly say, I couldn’t have made a better choice for such an occasion.

The book covers the migration out of the south from the early 1900s all the way through to the 1970s, and follows three African- Americans- Ida Brandon Gladney, who made it all the way from Mississippi to Chicago, George Swanson Starling, who traveled from Florida to New York, and Joseph Pershing Foster, who left Louisiana for Los Angeles, California. Each had a good reason for wishing to the leave the south, and while their ultimate destinations were still not ideal, they had far more freedoms afforded to them.

The three main subjects are not the only people the author includes in the book, sporadically weaving in tales about others who migrated out of the South, which paints a full picture of how and why these decisions to relocate changed the dynamics in other parts of the United States.

The amount of research that went into this book is astounding. The stories are personable and real, allowing one to visualize the journey through the eyes of the Ida, George, and Joseph- by putting the reader in their shoes, into situations that really makes one think.

This book is ambitious and immense. It dispels myths, recalls important traditions, and chronicles the adversity, the challenges, setbacks and disappointments facing those who only wished to achieve freedom and a better life. The journey, though long and arduous, paved with adversity and tribulation, is also one of triumph and success.

The struggles are still here, obviously, but these stories are a reminder of what can be accomplished when one has the courage, not only to take chances and make changes, but to also make a difference for themselves and for the benefit of future generations.

Five big epic stars! ( )

I saw this on several thread on LT and decided to give it a try - and was not only not disappointed but I am completely thrilled about this one.

Isabel Wilkerson's non-fiction book deals with the Great Migration, going from about 1915 until about 1970, when millions of African-Americans moved from the Jim-Crow-dominated South to the Northern cities of the United States. She interviewed 1200 people for this book and you notice the hard work that went into it. This doesn't mean it is difficult to read or straining. Not at all. She chose three people and their lives to show different destinies during different decades and frames these lives with summeries of what happened on a bigger scale. (Does this sentence make sense?)

It's profound and touching, makes you angry - and leaves you speechless and shocked. Moreover it is actually "epic"... it is maybe a stupid comparison: But when I read the last pages and said goodbye to Ida Mae, George and Robert, I kind of felt like as sad and depressed as at the ending of The Lord of the Rings. I immersed myself into their lives and stories and felt close to them, hoped with them, felt their losses and celebrated their successes.

This personal aspect plus the precious insight I got makes this one a masterpiece in my mind. It really helped me understand the current situation of African-Americans and why there is so much racism e.g. in Florida. I knew but haven't realized somehow how close the 1970s are - and that there are only 16 year between the final end of Jim Crow and my birthday. ( )

Finally had my second library hold come through so I could finish the last 50 pages, and I'm glad I held out. This is a really remarkable piece of journalism and writing. Aside from the enormous breadth of the story Wilkerson is telling—about the deep injustices of the Jim Crow South, this enormous migration of people north and west, the circumstances they had to adjust to once they got where they were going, and the steady but slow progress of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s, all playing out together—she humanizes these big histories by telling the detailed stories of three individuals who migrated from the South in different decades. The fact that she pulled off such a multilayered account so well, with a pitch-perfect rhythm swinging between micro and macro—and that she communicated the horror of the situations folks were escaping without being melodramatic—impressed the hell out of this writer. It's a balancing act of journalism and it feels seamless. And I learned a lot about a sweeping piece of American history. ( )

What a fantastic read. I was aware of the Great Migration but Wilkerson brings the stories of three people and lots of other stories and histories to vivid life. Especially in our current time of finally looking at racial justice and injustice, it is a deeply thoughtful and insightful book that made me think of what has happened in this country, not in the distant past, but in my own lifetime.

This book documents that migration of southern Blacks to the North from 1915 to 1970, focusing on three life stories involving individuals who moved North. This is a really solid work of non-fiction, written in 2010; well written and researched.
It is a fairly long book,but easy to read. My one quibble with the book is sthat there were a number of cases when she repeated herself, I do think some of the writing could have been tightened up.
I am glad that I finally read this book (we read it for my other book group); lots of insights into the lives of southern Blacks before and after the great migration.

There are also some great chapter headings, as in this quote from [[James Baldwin]]

"We cannot escape our origins, however hard we might try, these origins contain the key---could we but find it--to all that we later become." ( )