Cannonball Read 13

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Search This Site

> FAQ Home
> Tag: isabel wilkerson

Two out of three in Caste bingo (is not a game I want to win)

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

by Leave a Comment

I imagine at the end of the day this book is more like 3.5 stars that I am rounding up. I’d say it’s three star for what it is trying to do, but four stars if I take it at what (I thought) was face value. Which is to say, I just finished this book and feel 50/50 convinced by Wilkerson’s thesis that America suffers from a caste issue, as opposed to (or, above a) race issue. I am Indian-American, so taking a step back […]

“They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done. They left.”

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

by 3 Comments

My boyfriend read The Warmth of Other Suns (2010) by Isabel Wilkerson and suggested that I read it. I trust his judgment, but it didn’t hurt that it was named the best book of the year by a ton of publications. It also just sounded interesting. The Warmth of Other Suns is a non-fiction book about The Great Migration that occurred from 1915-1970. Coming into this novel, I was vaguely aware that a large number of Black Americans had moved up North after slavery ended, but that was […]

“Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.”

Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

by 4 Comments

This was really interesting to read back to back with How to Be an Antiracist; they shed light on each other in weird ways. But they are also two very different books! My main takeaway from Caste is that Isabel Wilkerson is a great writer. I’m set to read her first book next month, and I’m now looking forward to it even more. She employs metaphor and other literary techniques in a way that you don’t normally see from non-fiction writers. It brings a depth […]

It occurred to me that no matter where I lived, geography could not save me.

by Leave a Comment

CBR10Bingo – Underrepresented I chose this book for “Underrepresented” more because of the content than the specific author. In this book, Wilkerson tells a narrative history of the Great Migration through a few different interwoven stories of participants in the movement collected through interviews, public records, and plenty of other documents and evidence. The Great Migration in simple terms is the mass migration of Southern African Americans to northern and western cities in the US primarily from about 1910-1950 or so. Wilkerson treats the migration […]

They Didn’t Want to Leave, They Definitely Couldn’t Stay

by 4 Comments

“I was leaving the South/To fling myself into the unknown…./I was taking a part of the South/To transplant in alien soil,/To see if it could grow differently,/If it could drink of new and cool rains,/Bend in strange winds,/Respond to the warmth of other suns/And, perhaps, to bloom.”  – Richard Wright



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo
  3. Google Pay