Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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“Home was wherever she planted herself…”

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

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Cbr13bingo Home The Warmth of Other Suns, a National Book Award Winner, is a riveting study of the “Great Migration,” i.e., the movement of millions of Black Americans from the South to urban centers in the North and West during the period from 1915 to 1970. Isabel Wilkerson interviewed some 1200 participants in this migration in addition to scouring news sources, government studies, literature and more to provide this detailed and profoundly moving portrait of the generations of Black Americans who transformed not only their […]

I can see why she won the Pulitzer for this, but it wasn’t completely to my tastes.

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

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I’m really glad I did the audio version for this one, because I’m not sure my raccoon brain (shiny things only!) would have had the patience to sit through it otherwise, and it’s worth sitting through. Robin Miles is, as always, a great narrator. This book wasn’t quite what I was expecting, either. I had actually never learned about the Great Migration in all my many (many) years of school, which is not really surprising, but is disheartening, so I was excited to get into […]

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

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“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

An epic story told well

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Yet another book filling in the gaps of my education. I could make this whole review a rant of how most American history tends to skip over everyone who isn’t white and male, but I’ll resist. The Warmth of Other Suns tells the history of The Great Migration, the period in history when 6 million black people fled the South and its Jim Crow laws to make a better life for themselves in the North and West. This migration was a big fucking deal that […]



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