HISTORY

Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. I only just got around to reading this Pulitzer-winning 2010 study of the Great Migration, in which Wilkerson talked to and looked at the complicated lives of three of the countless southern blacks who moved north in the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s to escape the nightmare of racism in the Deep South. It’s not so much a piece of formal scholarship as an exercise in historically informed storytelling, but on that level it’s a really remarkable piece of work, written with immense sensitivity and packed with a wealth of telling, near-novelistic detail. For once, the subtitle is no exaggeration: this really is an epic story (TT).