Tim McCarthy and the Business of Good

October Book of the Month: “The Warmth of Other Suns”

Oct 1, 2011 1:07:00 PM / by Tim McCarthy

by Isabel Wilkerson
Book Link

Editor’s Note: Wilkerson is a first time book writer but a Pulitzer Prize winning feature writer for the New York Times. This epic non-fiction work traces the lives of three southern blacks from three different decades moving north from three different parts of the South. [more] The personal touch of their stories underlines the greater point which is another look at the study of black migration to the North over the fifty years from about 1920 to 1970.  I was relatively unaware of the facts – such as the similarities of this “migration” to others such as the European migration to America.  I also found interesting that migration patterns followed the railroad mainline routes of the times:  Louisiana to California; Mississippi to Chicago; Florida to NYC are the ones she chooses.  It’s a long and sometimes tough (true stories that are painful to remember) read but to me it was worth it.  I learned a lot and it was written well enough to be more entertaining than most non-fiction.

 

Excerpt:   “Their migration was a response to an economic and social structure not of their making.  They did what

humans have done for centuries when life was untenable – what the pilgrims did under the tyranny of British Rule….what the Irish did when there was nothing to eat, what the Jews did during the spread of Nazism.”       

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