As the autumn leaves begin to change and you find yourself wanting to read a great book to pair with that glass of red wine, consider Isabel Wilkerson’s “The Warmth of Other Suns.” The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist brings attention to one of America’s most influential social transformations: the Great Migration.
The exodus of over six million African Americans from the rural southern states to the industrial north in a period of five decades (1920’s – 1960’s) remade New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles. It transformed American culture; turned jazz, the blues and gospel music into national phenomena; and fueled the Civil Right’s Movemement.
Wilkerson's "The Warmth of Other Suns" is a brilliant and stirring epic, the first book to cover the full half-century of the Great Migration. A daughter of Southern migrants, Ms. Wilkerson combines impressive research—which included interviewing more than 1,200 people, she says—with great literary power.
Though "The Warmth of Other Suns" is a rigorous work of history and not a novel, Wilkerson humanizes history through use of narration, giving it emotional and psychological depth. She is especially good at capturing the experiential sense of life in the poor South and of the migration itself.
In a book that, quite amazingly is her first, Wilkerson has pulled off an all but impossible feat. She has not only documented the sweeping 55-year-long migration of African Americans, she has used narration to make her stories interesting and compelling, challenging dismissive assumptions about one of America's greatest social movements.
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