The Warmth of Other Suns

Amazing book about a part of history that I knew basically nothing about before. Really enjoyed the parallel stories of the three main characters (characters isn't the right word but this book reads almost like fiction, so we'll use it). Great historical background and context to a lot of things that are still playing out in American culture today. Audio edition is very well-produced.

This is the most captivating and moving non-fiction work I've found in a long time. Isabel Wilkerson takes hundreds of hours of interviews and historical records research and turns them into 3 main narratives following real people starting in the southern US and ending in California, Chicago, and New York. I'd have loved to have each narrative straight through, as the characters were captivating in their own right - a sharecropper and family struggling in Mississippi, a citrus grove worker nearly lynched in Florida, and a doctor who found some amount of freedom in the army and then could not find joy in his Louisiana home or even his wife's Atlanta. However, Wilkerson splits them up into periods, so we meet the characters in their childhood in the south; we watch them each grow up; we see their struggles to leave the south, etc...all in parallel although their trips occurred at different times.

Through the narratives, we can feel the pain and indignity experienced by blacks all across the US (it was not completely isolated to the Jim Crow south) from their point of view. This is a painfully different story than we learned in history class: as it turns out, we did not have the Civil War followed by freedom and joy for the majority of black Americans. We had a Civil War followed by decades of terrible treatment for the majority of black Americans (on or off the books of law). The migration that Wilkerson covers goes into the 1970's - this means that only now do we have a generation of age without their own memory of such a time. Looking at current events suggests that these issues are still not resolved, and America struggles with deep racism. NOTE that many other peoples have integrated into the US during the last century and those with white skin do not face such extensive discrimination.

In addition to the compelling narrative, there are bits of poetry and prose sprinkled throughout from the likes of Langston Hughes and James Baldwin, in just the right places to give those words fresh perspective.

I encourage everyone to read The Warmth of Other Suns. Younger folks may not understand, but high school on up can relate back to their incomplete history lessons and gain a better appreciation for the experience of a huge portion of our society.

After reading Caste, I was excited to read Wilkerson's other works but this is too much narrative and not enough non-fiction for my current mood. So I am marking this dnf and perhaps I will try again someday when the pandemic stops making me so moody about my reading choices.