It is with great excitement that I announce our next book club selection.
THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS by Isabel Wilkerson.
I was first introduced to the book back in 2010 by Dr. Susan Massad, a P4P book club regular. I could not put it down! The book is a brilliant and compelling look at the Great Migration by over 6 million African Americans fleeing the rural South to the cities of the North, Midwest and West from 1916 to 1970 in search of a better life.
Isabel Wilkerson will be participating in our book club conference call on Sunday, July 13th at 7 pm EST.
You can order your copy at Amazon, or any other bookseller of your choice.
Here is a description of the book from Isabel’s website:
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, USA Today, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, The Economist, Boston Globe, Newsday, Salon and many others
In a story of hope and longing, three young people set out from the American South during different decades of the 20th Century en route to the North and West in search of what the novelist Richard Wright called “the warmth of other suns.”
Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster are among the six million African-Americans who fled the South during what would become known as the Great Migration, a watershed in American history. This book interweaves their stories and those of others who made the journey with the larger forces and inner motivations that compelled them to flee, and with the challenges they confronted upon arrival in the New World.
Is this book a novel or a documentary of the people featured in the story? I tend to avoid fiction at every turn. Rich Stevenson, Common Sense II Political Reforms
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The Warmth of Other Suns is nonfiction, extremely well researched.
This sounds like a great read! My grandparents, who were white sharecroppers, were also part of the migration from the rural south (Tennessee) to the industrial north (Cleveland, Ohio) in search of work during the 1940s.
I chose the story of Ida Mae because although the Great Migration must have been difficult for everyone, I feel that for a woman it must have been even more difficult. Although I plan to read all three stories I chose that one. So far it is excellent. I think the great migration was not just stories of people from the south but also from where my family came from Puerto Rico.