This is a fantastic and engaging book about America's Great Migration in the 1900s as Black Americans left the Jim Crow South for new lives and better opportunities in the North. We follow three people's real stories - Ida Mae, George and Robert from three different Southern locations as they move themselves and their families and how their lives turn out in the North but they never lose their connection to the South.

I listened to this on audiobook and while it was a long listen, I throughly enjoyed it. As a non-American reader, I enjoyed learning more about this time in American history and this isn't something I had known about before though obviously we learn about the American Civil War and the US Civil Rights Movement in Irish education, this is a topic that is connected to these but its own story entirely. I found it interesting to see how the North wasn't automatically better for the migrants - while they escaped the suffocating Jim Crow of the South, they still faced and dealt with a lot of racial discrimination and divide in different ways in the North - and Northern cities such as Chicago and New York were forever changed after his migration as well in socio-economic and city division ways as well which was fascinating. It was also amazing to hear of some of the famous people who would never have been able to reach the heights they did if their parents or family members hadn't chosen to migrant to the North where they had the opportunities the did.

The care and detail put into the research for this book must have been immense and really commend the author for doing a stellar job - from the sounds of it, this book took a long time to research and write as she sat and talked to Ida Mae, George and Robert in the later years of their lives to understand their story and experiences better.

Highly recommend this!

At times this felt like a draft version so not sure if I read the final version. There were certain repetitions for sure but the subject on a whole was so intriguing and the stories really heartfelt (though probably well chosen and not necessarily representative for the entire population of people who were part of the migration) that I didn't mind.
The subject itself makes this book a must read

I've had this book for such a long time and finally read it and I now have no idea what took me so long to pick this up. Isabel Wilkerson has written a must-read book, she has managed to write about an extremely serious and relevant topic in an exceptionally compelling and informative way. This book isn't dry, it's engaging and so unique with following three families across three time periods and all their experiences. Learning about this era of history and race is super important and needs more air time.

I can't believe it took me so long to read this book but I now truly understand what the fuss is all about. Isabel Wilkerson is a master of non-fiction; she's wide in scope and yet artful in execution. She's serious yet never dry, compelling yet never flippant. She opened my eyes (and the eyes of so many around the world) to the reality of the Great Migration and honestly, I can't wait to continue the Wilkerson supremacy in picking up her other books.

The Warmth of Other Suns is about the the great migration that took place between the South and the North in the United States during the Jim Crow era. It is a history that I was not taught in school, but it should be as it is important part of US history. To give the history a sense of narrative, Wilkerson essentially weaves the biographies of three different people together to tell the story of the the great migration. She also includes illustrative stories from others, but have the three central biographies as part of the book makes it more easily relatable. The writing is really good and the books reads at a good pace. I was a bit intimidated by the length, but it is so interesting and engrossing the length didn't matter. I just set a goal to read a little bit every day, and usually read more than I set out to read. I honestly think this is a book that should be added to high school US history syllabus because it goes into so much depth not just about the Migration, but all the factors and effects surrounding it, including an explanation of Jim Crow in the South and its implications, as well as ways that prejudice manifested in the North. Highly recommended.

An absolutely amazing read! Follows the migrations of three African-American families from the south to New York, Chicago, and California, during three different time periods. Details all sorts of atrocities and difficulties faced by Blacks in America during the Jim Crow years, facts I had never heard before about a wide variety of discrimination.

For me personally, this book didn't work very well. It's clear that a lot of great research has been done and I generally enjoy reading Isabel Wilkerson's work. However, I struggled a lot with the pacing and the structure of this. I think I would have preferred it if we'd read each person's narrative individually rather than them being merged together. There were also a lot of time jumps from adulthood to childhood then back to adulthood which messed with my head a little bit. The informational content was really interesting, but it took a long time and a lot of extra effort to process it all!

This was an absolutely fascinating read, one I knew absolutely nothing about. It was so well researched and excellently presented. The editing was impeccable. Nothing unnecessary was included. I enjoyed every single page. Isabel Wilkerson was the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer prize for journalism and this book clearly shows why, It's a mastership, a must read for anybody interested in the history of African Americans and in the efforts some went to to achieve freedom and civil rights from themselves while all the time reacting to and surviving the racial prejudices and obstacles they met along their way. I enjoyed every moment of this book and I will read it again and again.

Definitely worth a read to get a different perspective on modern America. It treata modern slavery and Jim Crow with such interest

I loved this book. The Warmth of Other Suns looks at the migration of Black Americans from North to South America. It chronicles the journeys of several individuals. The author uses these journeys to show us: the reason for their flight, the journey and its tribulations, their arrival at their destination, and the racism that they faced throughout their lives. These weaving narratives highlight the racism faced by Black Americans in both parts of the U.S.A. Each of the narratives is engrossing and Immersive. I highly recommend this book.

This is a hugely impressive history of the Great Migration in the US (1910 - 1970) which is extremely well researched but also benefits from its focus on three particular stories. As such this is really three biographies and a contextual history book, and Wilkerson does a great job of using these stories - and others - to stitch together not just a portrait of the Jim Crow South of the first half of the 20th Century, but also the reception and conditions in the North and West where people migrated to. She has a central thesis, which is compelling, namely that despite moving within the same country, the distances, challenges and the numbers of families involved in the Great Migration should be thought of as the largest single piece of immigration in the country. Of course none of those involved consider themselves immigrants, but the experience and the psychology of such a move is tantamount to the same thing. This is important as the Black US population is rarely thought of as an immigrant population (being brought forceably is not immigration), but the pride and history of the USA as a nation of immigrant groups is part of its history that leaves the Black population out. Not only can they be thought of as immigrants to the Northern cities (with a conjoined set of prejudice to bundle up both racism and incomer hatred), but as they were fleeing persecution, they are almost equivalent to refugee populations. This doesn't change the experience or nature of the Great Migration, but as with everything there are a lot of studies on the value and impact of immigrant populations which have not been applied to the Great Migration which Wilkerson debunks here. The assumption was that those moving from the South caused crime and unemployment due to a lack of education. The figures show (much like immigrant populations)they tended to have higher rates of education, more family stability and worked more than their Northern compatriots,

These facts are bolstered by the three histories, which in themselves tell stories of lots of others who did not leave the South, other fellow travellers and some who ended up dead. Moving from the South, with its clear racist rules, to a North where the racism was often implied was not a road to Damascus, you were swapping a never present sword hanging over your head for a potential stab in the dark. Her three lives cover three kinds of migration too, across the education lines and to New York, Chicago and Los Angeles (with a decent Ray Charles cameo in between).

This is a chunky piece of work, but flows beautifully due to the lives encompassed within. Near the end of the book we get to know our aged protagonists, Wilkerson is driving one around for various family events, and she is hugely respectful of these people who are over eighty who can remember before and after. Another aspect of migrant, and particularly refugee, communities is their unwillingness to talk about the bad old days, and so there are generations who have the great migration in their blood that will know little about the actual conditions. The book was initially released in 2010, and there is a hopefulness in the end after Barack Obama's inauguration that probably wouldn''t exist if this book came out now. It is a huge part of the jigsaw of Black Lives Matters, both why the South took so long to integrate, and how the North pretended to but held on to its racism (the part of neighbourhoods is soul destroying). A terrific piece of page turning scholarship.

Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns is an extraordinarily detailed account of the migration of black Americans from the south to the north. It focusses on three stories in detail, using these to add a wealth of wider information about the social changes that took place during the migration period.

There are three stories told in detail, from the 1930s, 40s and 50s. These stories are told in whole-life span and in very loving detail. Of these three, I most enjoyed the story of Ida-Mae who settled in Chicago after fleeing the life of a crop-settler in the south.

This book is very, very long and has taken me several months to finish. Nevertheless, it was a very rewarding read, teaching me a lot about a social history of which I was wholly ignorant.

An intriguing and interesting read about migration in the United States. It was a fascinating read as I had not heard of this part of black history. It has obviously been well researched and well thought out.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

One of the best history books I've ever read, would highly recommend!

Isabel Wilkerson brilliantly tells the history of the Great Migration in the USA from the South to North between 1915 and 1970. Told through the different experiences of Ida Mae Gladney, Robert Foster and George Starling who migrated in different decades of the early 20th century.

It is a very fascinating, emotive and informative read.

The Warmth of Other Suns provides a rich, moving and informative account of the great migration.
I was hooked as soon as I started reading this book.
The subject was one that I'd been wanting to explore more and this book was perfect for that.
I throughly enjoyed this book and would highly recommend.

This is a deeply moving, incredibly poignant and truly fascinating look at the “Great Migration” of around six million African Americans from the Southern states of the US to the north and west during the 20th Century.

The realities of such an exodus are vividly brought to life via the biographies of three people; Ida Mae, George, and Robert, all of whom left the South in the mid-20th Century in search of something, anything, better than the lives they were living under Jim Crow law, with all of the suffering and indignities that those rules entailed. The author’s research is meticulous, and the narrative is interspersed with statistics and facts that left me stunned.

Most powerful, though, are the anecdotes and life stories of the three characters and other black citizens from the South that the author recounts with such compassion. I so often found myself shaking my head in either disbelief or fury over the humiliations the three main individuals were forced to endure, the violence they were threatened with or witnessed, and the relentless injustice that pervaded their entire lives. Their respective departures, whether they were a result of choice or necessity, were inspiring, and the author very cleverly weaves the experiences of the three individuals into the wider social, economic and cultural context of the time.

The book is long, but not a single syllable is wasted. The story is such an important one, and the author has done a fine job of showing just how heroic Idea Mae, George, Robert, and others like them were. This book is certainly one that will stay with me for a long time. I wish there had been some photos in the book, but there are pictures of the three main characters on the book’s website. I really cannot recommend this book highly enough, and will look out for more from this author in future.

My thanks to the author, NetGalley, and the publisher for the arc to review.

*Many thanks to Isabel Wilkerson, Penguin Press UK, and NetGalley for arc in exchange for my honest review.*
When I requested this particular book, I had one goal: to learn about the Great Migration and the Jim Crow aspect. These were the terms I often came across while reading my friends’ reviews or some novels, and I admit I had no knowledge of what these terms stand for. I understood the context, but I felt that was not enough. After getting tired of my ignorance, I chose this non-fiction after reading several wonderful reviews by my Friends.
Ms Wilkerson wrote a book that is long, but it cannot be short as the Great Migration took over 70 years, and she explains social, political and industrial aspect behind it through the lives of three African Americans and their families representing three waves of the Migration. The Authoress even argues that in fact it was immigration rather than migration in the context of the reasons, the difficulties for the migrants to overcome and tough conditions they found themselves in after the arrival where they hoped to find safety and stability. I was overwhelmed to learn how the US had changed owing to the influx of the African Americans to the North, and even more by the fact that they were not that warmly embraced there. This book was eye-opening for me indeed and is a must if you are interested in the American culture in the broad sense.

Although I was aware of words and phrases like Jim Crow, sharecropping, segregation and lynching, I had a poor comprehension of how bad existence was in the South of America before reading this book. Also I had not realised that for African Americans there had been progress after the Civil War, which was then lost by the increasing harshness of laws. I had the impression that things improved in infinitesimally slow increments from 1865 in a linear fashion. How heartbreaking it must have been for those who lived at those times and saw the beginnings of hope and a just society, only for it to be taken away from them. I can see that this would create an atmosphere where there would be a memory of better times, and a determination to seek them out again. Migration is not a step taken lightly, but I ended up amazed that more people did not leave.
The author describes the conditions in the South by referring to statistics and documents, but also by integrating many testimonies into the book, and in particular by following the lives of 3 specific protagonists. I became invested in their lives, and since the narrative switches between them, I kept reading on to find out how they were faring. I got to know their stories, and to empathise with them as you would with friends. I had a single experience in America of driving late at night, becoming more tired and worried about whether I would find a motel, which gave me a small connection to the journey made by Robert Foster. But they were all going through the relatable human undertakings of finding accommodation, working, raising children and having fun. This emphasis on people′s stories makes the text very readable, and although packed with information I never found it a dry read.


I had a copy of this book early through Netgalley

i had expected to tolerate dry writing in the exploration of important history i was interested in - but far from it - lively and colourful, and focused - this is history writing at its best - closer to novel-writing with even similar techniques. i learned a great deal about different groups and their habits and how it influenced the flow of people. she is surely to be reckoned with as a popular and even important historian for her on-the-ground sensibility - terrific material, well written - highly recommend ..

I've been wanting to read this book for so long, but until it was republished it was so hard to find a copy in the UK. I'm so glad I finally managed to read it. It made me angry, sad, furious, bewildered and then amazed at the work that has gone into it. Totally loved it.