In my never-ending search for good books to binge on I’ve decided to post a new selection every Sunday. A book I’m really looking forward to reading is “The Warmth of Other Suns,” by Isabel Wilkerson which delves into the impact of the Great Migration on African Americans. Check out this review from the New York Times. Also, if you’d like to share a book that you’d like to binge on, please comment below.
Click to hear a special New York Times podcast about the book review: http://bit.ly/NYTPodcast.
Happy Sunday!
Excerpt from New York Times Book Review. Click link after excerpt for the full review.
Prophetic words, indeed, Isabel Wilkerson insists in “The Warmth of Other Suns,” her massive and masterly account of the Great Migration. Wilkerson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing at The New York Times in 1994 and currently teaches journalism at Boston University, has a personal stake in the story. Her mother left rural Georgia, her father southern Virginia, to settle in Washington, D.C. Wilkerson knows well the highly charged nature of this field. For many years, commentators routinely demeaned these migrants as the dregs of a failed society. Even the distinguished black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier fretted over the “ignorant, uncouth and impoverished” throngs that had invaded his beloved Chicago. Arguments raged for decades about the tangled pathology of black families divided from their rural roots and thrown together in dead-end Northern slums. “The migrants were cast as poor illiterates,” Wilkerson says, “who imported out-of-wedlock births, joblessness and welfare dependency wherever they went.”
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