The Warmth of Other Suns

Incredible.

There are a thousand things to say about this book, but I'll start with the writing itself. This book, as Wilkerson describes it, is made up of three parts.

First, a sweeping overview of the Great Migration using newspaper clipping, statistics, studies, overarching themes, timelines, and more. This provides an incredibly detailed description of over half a century of American history, through the lens of black Southerners moving north.

Second, the story bounces from migrant to migrant, giving us snippets of their stories, moments and experiences they had that add life and personality to the statistical mass of people that left their homes for the North.

Third, and the thing that elevated this book to new heights, was the three people who each left the South in different decades from different towns and arrived in different northern cities with different results. We follow these three people from the start of their life to the end. We learn their strengths and weaknessess; failures and successes; habits and vices; loves and hatreds; fears and joys. We get to know them intimately, love them deeply, and humanize further what is otherwise an incredibly detailed account of the individual choices of thousands upon thousands of people that, unbenownst to them, shaped American history forever.

The zoom-in-zoom-out style was spectacular. To hear three detailed, harrowing accounts of the trip out of the South, then zoom out to describe the stats -- the thousands that followed with their own experiences as unique as the three we're following -- is overwhelming in the best way. It is the perfect combination of information with empathy.

I am so glad to have learned about this period of history that is too often brushed over. The time between the breakdown of Reconstruction and the Civil Rights movement is full of heartache and joy and sacrifice and regular people making decisions about themselves and their families that, in cummulation, change the whole country. I am grateful there are people out there that write like this, that research like this, that interview like this.