Review of The Warmth of Other Suns

Review of The Warmth of Other Suns. My list of books to be read is hopelessly long and getting longer. Isabel Wilkerson’s masterpiece The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration has been on that list for quite some time and I want to thank Dorie Maxwell for encouraging me to move it up on my list. If you read one book on American history this year, read this book. Wilkerson’s exhaustive research combined with her ability to tell a great story will draw you into the history of an event that changed America dramatically yet it is rarely discussed in most histories of America. It is the definitive story of the migration of nearly six milliion southern blacks to the north from WWI to the 1970s in search of a better life, a freer life. It is told masterfully through three families. One left the cotton fields of Mississippi for Chicago, another left the citrus fields of Florida for New York, and another left Louisiana for Los Angeles. One learns how this massive migration of people changed our cities, the North, the South, and America in general. It dispells the myths of early research on these migrants. It is also one of the best histories of Jim Crow in both the south and the north that you will ever read. This book is a must read.