The Warmth of Other Suns. The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a sharecropper's wife, left Mississippi for Milwaukee in 1937, after her cousin was falsely accused of stealing a white man's turkeys and was almost beaten to death. In 1945, George Swanson Starling, a citrus picker, fled Florida for Harlem after learning of the grove...
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Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a sharecropper's wife, left Mississippi for Milwaukee in 1937, after her cousin was falsely accused of stealing a white man's turkeys and was almost beaten to death. In 1945, George Swanson Starling, a citrus picker, fled Florida for Harlem after learning of the grove owners' plans to give him a "necktie party" (a lynching). Robert Joseph Pershing Foster made his trek from Louisiana to California in 1953, embittered by "the absurdity that he was doing surgery for the United States Army and couldn't operate in his own home town." Anchored to these three stories is Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Wilkerson's magnificent, extensively researched study of the "great migration," the exodus of six million black Southerners out of the terror of Jim Crow to an "uncertain existence" in the North and Midwest. Wilkerson deftly incorporates sociological and historical studies into the novelistic narratives of Gladney, Starling, and Pershing settling in new lands, building anew, and often finding that they have not left racism behind. The drama, poignancy, and romance of a classic immigrant saga pervade this book, hold the reader in its grasp, and resonate long after the reading is done.
źródło opisu: Random House, 2010
źródło okładki: http://www.amazon.com
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Format: papier
ISBN:
9780679444329
Publish date: 7 sierpnia 2010
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Pages no: 640
Edition language: English
Category:
Non Fiction,
Biography,
History,
Literature,
Cultural,
Book Club,
American,
African American,
American History,
Sociology,
Biography Memoir,
Race
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration is epic indeed. What's most amazing about this book is the sheer amount of research that must have gone into it. Despite focusing largely on only three migrants, Isabel Wilkerson interviewed nearly two hundred individuals in addit...
I did not want this book to end. For twenty hours I was just listening and enjoying the stories and then I noticed it was almost over. Sadness. You should definitely read this.
Amazingly researched and written history of the African-American/black migration from the south to the cities of the north, midwest, and west. Wilkerson is a Pulitzer-winning journalist, and journalists doing history usually drives me crazy. But she knows her stuff, can research, and can write--and ...
It was an interesting choice, tying such a huge historical movement to just three individual stories. There were some real advantages—hearing about the specifics of each person's leaving day, for instance, really brought home what a difficult endeavor it was, and why. But I did wish for a little mor...