For the most part, it felt in texture more like a novel, or a memoir. I’ve never read anything quite like this book. The book is astonishingly beautiful - lyrical, balladic! - in tenor, and Wilkerson’s retelling of the biographies of these three individuals treats them with the dignity they deserved but did not receive during their lifetimes. The book dislodges everything I thought I knew about the movement of Black Americans from the South to urban centers in the North and West in the 20th century by anchoring the phenomenon in the real, lived experience of three brave migrants who chose to leave their homes in Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana in search of better and more equitable futures. (Sept.It took me a long time to get through Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, a historical account of the Great Migration (I started in June and did not finish until last week), but it was worth it. The drama, poignancy, and romance of a classic immigrant saga pervade this book, hold the reader in its grasp, and resonate long after the reading is done.

Wilkerson deftly incorporates sociological and historical studies into the novelistic narratives of Gladney, Starling, and Pershing settling in new lands, building anew, and often finding that they have not left racism behind. Robert Joseph Pershing Foster made his trek from Louisiana to California in 1953, embittered by 'the absurdity that he was doing surgery for the United States Army and couldn't operate in his own home town.' Anchored to these three stories is Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Wilkerson's magnificent, extensively researched study of the 'great migration,' the exodus of six million black Southerners out of the terror of Jim Crow to an 'uncertain existence' in the North and Midwest. In 1945, George Swanson Starling, a citrus picker, fled Florida for Harlem after learning of the grove owners' plans to give him a 'necktie party' (a lynching). Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a sharecropper's wife, left Mississippi for Milwaukee in 1937, after her cousin was falsely accused of stealing a white man's turkeys and was almost beaten to death.

The warmth of other suns pages