A note about one of the authors mentioned in my last post, the extraordinary Isabel Wilkerson (yes, I am a fan): A former writer for the New York Times, she is the first Black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in American journalism. Inspired by her own parents migration from the South to Washington D.C. when she was a child, she devoted 15 years to writing a compelling narrative on the nation's great unsung migration. From World War 1 through the 1970s, some six million Blacks fled their homes in the South to create new lives in urban centers in the North and West.
A reviewer for The Wall Street Journal wrote: “The Warmth of Other Suns is a brilliant and stirring epic, the first book to cover the full half-century of the Great Migration… Wilkerson combines impressive research…with great narrative and literary power. Ms. Wilkerson does for the Great Migration what John Steinbeck did for the Okies in his fiction masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath; she humanizes history, giving it emotional and psychological depth.”
Isabel Wilkerson is a writer of truly dazzling gifts, but it is her depth of research and her humanity that take her work to another plane entirely. I humbly predict that her book will earn her a second Pulitzer Prize this year. Remember I said that. You can find out more at isabelwilkerson.com.
Thanks for the heads-up on this interesting-sounding book!
ReplyDeleteThank you for the name of the book. I booked it in the library.
ReplyDeletepure coincidence, i actually held it in my hand at the library yesterday--but put it down in favor of the new oliver sacks. i'll get it next time...thank you!
ReplyDeleteI do believe this book is one of the great ones.
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