The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

I've been meaning to read this for years. I remember adding this to my list after seeing someone in my carpool reading it when I was commuting to San Francisco. Then the RS book group did it for their book last fall and I get on the hold list at the library and I waited for months.

It's a tome, which was intimidating and kept me from starting it, but once in it, the stories are so compelling you want to keep reading. It follows three main people: Ida Mae Gladney who moved from Mississippi to Chicago in 1937 to get out of sharecropping, George Starling who moved from Florida to New York City in 1945 to avoid being lynched, and Robert Foster who moved from Louisiana to LA in 1953 for his ambitions to become a great doctor.

I particularly liked Ida Mae's story and would compare some of her late timeline with my own life, as a lived in the Chicago suburbs in the 90s and early 2000s. She died right around the time my very white high school English class was listening and writing reports on Ghetto Life 101 (https://www.thirdcoastfestival.org/fe...) and being pushed to think about how race defined us. And how not very far away lived people whose lives and experiences differed so greatly from our own.

I also knew Dr. Foster ended up in LA, but I was hoping for him to stay in Oakland when he came to California. I bike through the intersection mentioned, Lusk and 42nd, at least once a week on my way to the grocery store, sometimes more.

It's amazing how both short and long our collective memory is. I'd recommend this book to everyone. It's very important and absolutely deserves the Pulitzer Prize. It is a gem.