May 2017 Book Group


Event Details


May’s selection is The Warmth of Other Suns: The Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

In a story of hope and longing, three young people set out from the American South during different decades of the 20th Century en route to the North and West in search of what the novelist Richard Wright called “the warmth of other suns.”

Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster are among the six million African Americans who fled the South during what would become known as the Great Migration, a watershed in American history.  This book interweaves their stories and those of others who made the journey with the larger forces and inner motivations that compelled them to flee, and with the challenges they confronted upon arrival in the New World.

Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson devoted 15 years to the research and writing of The Warmth of Other Suns.  She interviewed more than 1,200 people, unearthed archival works, and gathered the voices of the famous and the unknown to tell the epic story of the Great Migration, one of the biggest under reported stories of the 20th Century and one of the largest migrations in American history.

Book description from IsabelWilkerson.com.

 


The SDARJ Book Group usually meets on the fourth Tuesday of the month; 6:00 – 7:45 p.m. at the Lewes Library, 111 Adams Avenue, Lewes, Delaware 19958. Book club participants choose titles to read and discuss at future meetings.