A true and wonderful gift for us all!! | The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great...

Pulitzer Prize Material | The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration | Isabel Wilkerson

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	• The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration Isabel Wilkerson Random House, 2010 - 640 pages average customer review:based on 21 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Emotional, enthralling, a major event

This is one of the best books I've ever read. The stories of three individuals who made the trek out of the South during the 20th century. I ran the gamut of emotions from rage at the indignities and cruelties suffered to elation at the courage and humanity of these remarkable people. This is a piece of history that needs to be understood by all Americans--white and black. It's as much a part of our unique heritage as the Revolutionary War.

A must read and discuss. A major achievement.

A true and wonderful gift for us all!!

Never have I ever been so thoroughly moved and personally impacted by one book. This is a true gift to me and all Americans who truly love this country and want her to thrive and prosper!! To know and understand this historical perspective of Black Americans, their struggles, perserverence and courage, is to acknowledge one more incredible American story poured into the melting pot that is our great country. As a child of Migrants to Philadelphia in the 1940's, I can truly say that I have lived my life on the "Wings of These Angels."

The beauty with which the story is written, with the opportunity to be a spectator to the lives of Ida Mae, Robert and George, left me unable to continue at certain points in the book. I simply had to put it down and take a time out before reading any further. Suddenly I was no longer a spectator but a participant and the emotion was just too much. I felt as if I had climbed inside and wept at the loss of my new friends as the book came to an end.

There was an Ida Mae, a Robert and a George in my childhood and in the lives of so many children of the Migration generation. This book was a gift in seeing them and myself in a more crystal clear way.

Thank you, thank you, thank you Isabel Wilkerson!!!!

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Pulitzer Prize Material

Isabel Wilkerson's book is right up there with Grapes Of Wrath and I hope that both Oprah Winfrey and the Pulitzer Prize committee have read it. It is, quite simply, one of the most powerful books I've ever read.
A personal account now and one of the many reasons it hit home for me. My mother, a poor girl who was born and raised in the hills of Eastern Kentucky and was not allowed to get past the eighth grade (Her father believed that a woman's job was to have babies and work the farm.), left Kentucky in 1926 or 1927, headed for Arizona, and although she returned for visits, she stayed in the West the rest of her life. She was white and didn't have to deal with the oppression of the Jim Crow laws but she knew other laws of oppression from first hand experience-"Don't be gettin' above your raisin'."-"If you leave here, don't you ever come back."-"She's one of them hillbillies. They just trash." So she left. During WWII, she made parts for B24 Liberator bombers in California while her sisters in Kentucky pumped out babies. As for the Jim Crow laws, she believed that everyone was equal in the eyes of God and what God said was good enough for her. My father, who fought in two wars, said that the color of a man's skin didn't matter when you were sharing a foxhole and the Chinese army was coming at you. I'm proud to say that, being raised in the West, I never saw any kind of a 'Whites Only' sign until I was sixty years old and found an abandoned railroad depot somewhere in Oklahoma.
Also, the stories of what the African-Americans endured under the Jim Crow laws should give some interesting and disturbing insights into the minds of those Yahoos and hatemongers who 'want to return to real American values' and/or put Confederate flag plates on their cars. Jim Crow is the America they want, where rights belong to the white-excuse me, right people.

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To the North, West, Midwest, Men, Women, and Children

Isabela Wilkerson examines one of the most overlooked parts of American twentieth century history where migration of African Americans in the South took place after World War I within the Northern and the Western regions of the United States. Thousands departed homes that they had only known in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia and attempted to settle in a different New World than their European predecessors had previously done over 200 years ago with the forlorn tale of seeking a better life than what they had been living that also involved competitive elements within African American and other ethnic communities. Wilkerson takes the broad perspective of this history and narrows and writes a provocative narrative that focuses on three individuals, Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, who all had dreams and aspirations to make their way either to Chicago, Los Angeles, or New York where they could establish an identity all their own and not one fostered by ancillary circumstances.

Wilkerson provides a well-documented and descriptive story of each individual that shows the enduring plight that Gladney, Starling, and Foster had to endure during America's Jim Crow Eras. The narratives of each person spans from 1915-1970. For readers who may not have been aware of this part of history, Wilkerson exposes the most conflicting parts of American history that still breathes of a different era that one may not have suspected existed well into the twentieth century, the nineteenth century, which resonates of a period frozen in time constricted with racial divisions and perceptions written with color lines in mind between Black and White.

With every detail experienced and witnessed by each person, what stands out the most about their stories is their sacrifice and willingness to never give up during the most uncompromising situations that one today would most likely take for granted. Despite the ironic aspects of their stories that predominate the bulk of the book, one will definitely see the similarities of each person and most of all their differences. Foster's story is interesting, especially how he did not let past adversities dictate what he wanted to achieve; he was able to earn a college education, serve overseas in the Army during World War II as a doctor, and return with hopes of opening his own practice in California. However, like many African American men during this period, he experienced much discrimination but not without overcoming those moments. As one reads Gladney and Starling's stories, they appear similar in dimension and the very vivid images that are spoken of that deal with the hardships that they along with friends and relatives had experienced in the deep South working in the cotton or orange groves that appear less than stellar as Foster's life.

The Warmth of Other Suns is an important part of history. For those familiar with Studs Terkel's works, Wilkerson appears to take a similar approach by intimately retelling Gladney, Starling, and Foster's stories. She does an exceptional job providing an in-depth account of these people who may not have been within the newspaper headlines but shared similar experiences of Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King, Jr. and helped to place within the forefront in terms of Civil Right to make the public aware and improve the lives of thousands of African Americans.

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Fascinating and moving

This book is a fascinating exploration of the experience of Blacks in the South -- the fear, the constraints, the deprivation and cruelty that led them to seek a better life elsewhere. It is told through three personal stories and so escapes being dry history and comes alive.

I highly recommend this book. I did not give it 5 stars because occasionally the author interrupts the flow to make a little speech. Her story speaks for itself and her polemics are distracting and not always totally convincing.

But other than that quibble, this book is excellent and well worth reading.

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In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves.

With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties.

Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work. Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is destined to become a classic.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

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