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Six hundred pages that fly by, America history written as creative nonfiction by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. Winner of the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction. Named to multiple Best of 2010 lists, including: The New York Times, The Economist, The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Chicago Tribune, Newsday, The Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Seattle Ti
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4.5 stars This is another important book that all Americans should read. Similar to Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow" it is a mind opening look at Jim Crow America (north and south) and the outrageous, overt, and violent discrimination that we perpetrated on black Americans which contributed to a mass migration from south to north and west during the 1900's, tapering off in the 70's following the civil rights movement. It follows three individuals which gives you a beautiful and personal c
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I highly recommend this book. Its scope is both vast and intimate, not an easy trick to pull off. It’s the 55-year history of African-American migration, from the South to the North. It’s an amazing sociological phenomenon, and Wilkerson draws the bigger picture with an understanding of how this enormous movement – six million people – affected the politics and culture of the times. At the same time, she traces three particular migrants through their lives, and so we get a lot of very small but
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Fantastic and fascinating book. I highly recommend it. Blasts away many myths about the African Americans who migrated from the South to the North and West -- they were better educated, more intact families, higher employment rates. The segregation and discrimination faced when they arrived in Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York seem to have hit the generation born in those cities very hard. The story is told by following 3 individuals who made the trip in 3 different decades/eras -- so this
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It is so important to Read this book! Fill in some of the gaps in your US history education.
This book was surprisingly moving. The aim, tell the tale of three individuals who never met nor had much in common outside their point of origin (the south) and their destination (the North) seem to me a task that would fall hopelessly short. It did not. The book does drag. The middle especially seems to get lost in details. Three stories do a good job of relating the wide range of experiences, poor, middle class and upper class educated African-Americans went through during the migration. And
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