nonfiction

Circle of Quiet, by Madeleine L’Engle

by

circle

Memoirs come in many different forms. Some tell a chronological story, while others center around a theme. Some experiment with different structures. First published in 1972, this first in a series of memoirs by the author of A Wrinkle in Time and other beloved stories is more of a meditation, inviting us to explore with her, follow her thoughts, and see where they take us.

In the process, L’Engle gives us the kaleidoscope of her life at 51: spouse, parent, writer, teacher, choir director, member of communities large and small.

Many of her reflections are about writing in general, and specifically writing for children. She’s forthright about her years of rejections and how she felt about them. Invited to teach, she maintains that writing cannot be taught, but you can teach particular tools. Of course, she learns as much as she teaches, classroom discussions leading to new ideas.

She also defends children’s literature: its enduring appeal, its benefits for children and adults, and its literary quality.

L’Engle notes that “the concentration of a small child at play is analogous to the concentration of the artist of any discipline.” In those moments, we are not conscious of ourselves, not self-conscious. She goes on to say: “Detachment and involvement: The artist must have both. The link between them is compassion.”

At one point she says that “An author is responsible for his characters in much the same way that a parent is for his children, or a teacher for his students.” I think she means a moral responsibility, but it is still a concept that I’ve been turning over in my mind.

She speaks of her family’s years in New York City, and even more the years at Crosswicks, their rambling summer home in a small Connecticut town where at times four generations of her family live under one roof. There is much about community, and the peculiar interrelationship of people in such a small village, such as being suspicious of newcomers but still turning out to help them when they are in need.

Her portrait of the U.S. in the 1960s—the time period of this memoir—sometimes distracted me, sending my mind off into my own memories of those years. Hearing how someone the age of my parents viewed the happenings of that turbulent time sent me back to my own memories, turning them into new patterns.

She doesn’t shy away from the big subjects, such as faith, marriage, family, what might constitute a meaningful life. Still, it is her thoughts on writing that most resonate for me.

I am often, in my writing, great leaps ahead of where I am in my thinking, and my thinking has to work its way slowly up to what the “superconscious” has already shown me in a story or poem. Facing this does help to eradicate do-it-yourself hubris from an artist’s attitude towards his painting or music or writing. My characters pull me, push me, take me further than I want to go, fling open doors to rooms I don’t want to enter, throw me out into interstellar space, and all this long before my mind is ready for it.

The title comes from her need to retreat sometimes to her “circle of quiet,” a particular place at Crosswicks. We all need such a place, one where we can be our true selves. If you want a rest from the trauma Olympics of many memoirs on the market, try these reflections from a writer whose work you may know very well.

Do you have a “circle of quiet,” a place that is peculiarly your own?

A Spy Among Friends, by Ben Macintyre

by

9780553397895-3396267328

I thought I knew a lot about Kim Philby, the infamous Third Man of Cold War-era Britain. In 1951, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, two of Philby’s friends from university, were exposed as Russian spies, but were tipped off in time to escape to the USSR. At the time, and for years afterward, there were rumors of a third spy, a mole in England’s security service.

Macintyre’s astonishing account of Philby’s life, how he operated as a spy, and especially how he continued to escape detection until 1963, shows me how much more there is to the story. With penetrating insight, voluminous research, and access to newly opened files, Macintyre has fashioned an absorbing nonfictional narrative that helps us understand the man himself and the milieu in which he operated.

The title refers to E. M. Forster’s famous statement: “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” Forster spoke for a certain segment of English society. A generation later, it is the key to Philby’s choices: He gave his first loyalty to his true friends, the four schoolmates who, together with him, became known as the Cambridge spies.

Many people believed themselves to be Philby’s friends; however, extracts from his writings show what he really thought of them, even as he pretended to value them. Philby beguiled everyone he met.

The word most consistently used to describe Kim Philby was ‘charm,’ that intoxicating, beguiling, and occasionally lethal English quality. Philby could inspire and convey affection with such ease that few ever noticed they were being charmed. Male and female, old and young, rich and poor, Kim enveloped them all. He looked out at the world with alert, gentle blue eyes from under an unruly forelock. His manners were exceptional: he was always the first to offer you a drink, to ask after your sick mother and remember your children’s names. He loved to laugh, and he loved to drink – and to listen, with deep sincerity and rapt curiosity.

He was “the right sort,” a member of the tribe of Eton-educated, cricket-loving Englishmen who populated MI6—and other institutions—in class-conscious England. For such a person there was no need to inquire into their references, their past, or even their competence.

Part of what makes this book so fascinating is Macintyre’s portrayal of the competing cultures in the nascent security organisations of the time: MI6’s old-boy bonhomie, MI5’s mistrust of their rival’s upper-class blindness, the newly-formed CIA’s respect for their predecessor.

No one was more taken in than Nicholas Elliot, also of MI6. Over the thirty years that the two men worked and socialised together, Elliot never suspected that everything he shared with Philby went straight to the KGB. When the evidence finally mounted to a point in 1963 where MI6 could no longer deny the truth, they sent Elliot to debrief the man he had considered his best friend.

Using the transcript of that conversation, Macintyre fashions a stunning conclusion to this book, decoding the seemingly innocuous dialogue. A lengthy afterword by John le Carré includes his own memories of Elliot and the other players.

Subtitled Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, this is a story that shows the human impact of these political intrigues. James Angleton, head of counter-intelligence for the CIA, also counted Philby as a friend. Macintyre’s description of the effect of Philby’s betrayal on Angleton stands in contrast to the Great Game, the name for the 19th century rivalry between Britain and Russia. Coincidentally, the term was popularised by Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, also the source of Harold Adrian Russell Philby’s nickname.

By immersing us in the moves and countermoves of individuals during the Cold War, Macintyre helps us see how it can come to seem like a game, and how it can become an addiction for men like Philby, Elliot, and Angleton. Then he shows us how the game plays out. Brilliant.

What nonfiction books have you read that are as absorbing as a novel?

Best Books I Read in 2022

by

As a writer, I learn something from every book I read. In no particular order, these are the ten best books I read in 2022. Please check the links to the blog archive for a fuller discussion of those I’ve reviewed.

1. The Wall, by Marlen Haushofer
The narrator wakes from a nap to find herself alone. She’s visiting family members at their hunting lodge on the edge of the Alps, and they have gone into town, leaving her with their dog Lynx. She walks down the road to meet them, but both she and the dog run into an invisible wall that separates them from the rest of the world. This journal of her solitary life in the years that follow is stunning.

2. Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell
O’Farrell’s tour de force focuses on Agnes, Hamnet’s mother, Shakespeare’s wife, and in so doing immerses us in the day-to-day experience of raising children and managing a household in Elizabethan England. What makes this novel so stunning is the author’s evocation of the details of each scene. It is a powerful reading experience that gives us insight into Shakespeare’s work, but even more into the lives of the many women who loved, married, and bore children in obscurity.

3. Generations: A Memoir, by Lucille Clifton
Lucille Clifton is one of my favorite poets and a huge influence on my writing. In this memoir, originally published in 1976 and now a new edition from New York Review Books, she brings a poet’s sensibility to crafting her story. The chapters, while prose, in their brevity exhibit the conciseness of poetry; anything not absolutely necessary is pared away, leaving the kernel. And you, the reader, bring your own understanding and experience to fill in the spaces.

4. Memorial Drive, by Natasha Trethewey
Trethewey is another of my favorite poets, so I looked forward to reading her memoir. Not needing to know anything more than the author’s name, I plunged in, only to emerge finally, astonished and awed. With a poet’s concision and musicality, she conjures her rural Southern childhood. Trethewey’s voice is quiet—quiet as Black women’s voices have had to be. Yet with all that, her voice carries the emotions held in check by her composure, a tribute to the author’s exquisite use of language. She has created a moving exploration of memory and of how we manage, or fail to manage, our painful past.

5. Migrations, by Charlotte McConaghy
Arriving in Greenland with only her research gear, Franny Stone is determined to study the last of the Arctic terns. She says that even though her expedition has been canceled, she intends to follow the terns on what will be their final migration to Antarctica. The book is set in the near future when climate change has wiped out most birds, fish, and animals. Although disapointing at times, this profound story is worth your attention.

6. The Tradition, by Jericho Brown
I am astonished by these poems, the power and sheer artistry of them. They are personal and political, specific and universal. Brown deploys the tools of poetry—enjambment, white space, personification—boldly. Some of the poems take up hardly any space, lines only two or three words long. Yet even with that limitation they are remarkable, the fragmentation creating a rhythm in counterpoint to and with the rhythm of the words. He also creates his own tools, complex forms that defy gravity.

7. The Crane Wife, by CJ Hauser
This book of essays, anchored by the superb title essay, is about the stories we tell ourselves about our lives and about who we are. Hauser balances personal stories with those of others, sometimes her friends, sometimes writers or their characters, sometimes the natural world.

8. The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson
From 1915 to 1970 almost six million Black citizens left the south for northern and western cities looking for better lives. For the first time Wilkerson’s monumental book gives us a history of the Great Migration. The book is long but eminently readable, due to Wilkerson’s approach. By closely following stories of three individuals, she captures the reader’s attention and sympathy and keeps us turning pages.

9. Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler
This 1993 novel begins in the then-distant future of 2024, which startled me at first. Due to her mother’s drug abuse while pregnant, teenager Lauren Olamina actually feels all the sensations she witnesses in others. She calls it “sharing” and finds it a liability in her world, a dreadful world that is only too likely how things will turn out here, given the trends already present in the 1990s and only worse today. A brilliant story of one woman’s journey.

10. Miss Benson’s Beetle, by Rachel Joyce
London in 1950 is still recovering from World War II, with food rationed, ruined buildings being cleared, another generation of men wiped out, and women chucked out of their wartime jobs. Middle-aged spinster Margery Benson finally cracks and quits her job teaching domestic science in an elementary school with out-of-control children. She decides to set out on the adventure of a lifetime: an expedition to New Caledonia to find a mythical golden beetle. So much fun!

What were the best books you read in 2022?

The Crane Wife, by CJ Hauser

by

9780385547079-1084277655

I was first alerted to Hauser’s essay “The Crane Wife” by the Longreads list of best essays in 2019 which sent me to the Paris Review where it was published. I thought it brilliant.

So I looked forward to reading this book. Hauser calls it “a work of personal nonfiction,” saying “These essays reflect my life as I remember it and the stories I’ve made of that life to understand how to keep living in it.”

In “The Crane Wife” Hauser goes to Texas to study the whooping crane shortly after calling off her engagement. Sections alternate between her engagement and her experience with the cranes. Equally important are those who study the cranes, the motley collection of volunteers who welcome her to this Earthwatch event.

She gives a poignant recounting of her deteriorating relationship, constantly setting aside her own needs as shameful. Men are entitled to have needs, but “when a woman needs, she is needy.” At the same time she is measuring the small things that fill the needs of these whooping cranes who are on the verge of extinction.

The Crane Wife is a story from Japanese folklore about a crane who fell in love with a human man. She didn’t want him to know she was a crane, so every night she plucked out all of her feathers. “Every morning, the crane-wife is exhausted, but she is a woman again. To keep becoming a woman is so much self-erasing work.”

I found the book’s cover image disconcerting: a person, presumably a woman though not obviously, whose turtleneck is pulled up to erase her face, leaving her vulnerable stomach bare. I suppose it’s meant to refer to the title essay and Hauser’s erasure of herself, but it doesn’t reflect the collection and ultimately felt demeaning.

What makes these essays so good is the way she balances personal stories with those of others, sometimes her friends, sometimes a story’s characters, sometimes both. I especially enjoyed her bookish roamings through Rebecca and Shirley Jackson’s oeuvre. I also liked her travails in deciding what to say when asked to officiate at her friends’ wedding, wanting to capture the breadth and depth of the women’s relationship, while also discussing her obsession with The X Files and what she calls its MSR: Mulder-Scully Relationship.

Another reason these essays are so absorbing is her use of specific details, like shopping for nylon hiking pants that zipped off at the knee, and incisive incidents like a bit about Christmas stockings. Mostly, though, it is her openness that makes these essays hit home, her willingness to be vulnerable.

Many of them have to do with her love life, which I would have found more interesting thirty years ago. Still, I enjoyed them and even listened to the entire collection twice. It is read by the author, whose voice has a bubble of laughter under it, even during the sad parts, keeping me a little off balance, which is not a bad thing.

Near the end of the book she returns to the idea of the stories we tell ourselves about the events of our lives, stepping back from the story to comment on her authorial choices. This is a smart book and gave me a lot to think about.

What essay or essays would you put on your best-of-this-year list?

Year of the Monkey, by Patti Smith

by

smith

Part memoir and part meditation, part travelogue and part dream journal: this book takes us into Smith’s world during the unsettling year 2016. Smith’s wanderings during that Chinese zodiac year certainly embody a monkey’s traits of cleverness, curiosity, and mischievousness.

The year starts for Smith with a series of concerts at San Francisco’s Fillmore Theatre, followed by a surreal visit to Santa Cruz. From there she takes off on solitary wanderings to places like New York, Arizona, Kentucky, as well as to imagined and remembered places. She talks to strangers, meeting real and imagined people. She keeps vigil at the bedside of a beloved friend in a coma and visits another near the end of his life.

But more than her physical journeys, it’s what happens when she brings her particular mindset to grapple with the small irritations of life like the flood in her apartment, the larger problems in the country careering toward a showdown between democracy and what we then thought was populism in the November election, and most of all the death of friends and lovers, as well as the sense of her own time on earth running out as she approaches her 70th birthday.

It is art that holds her steady, whether studying the Ghent altarpiece or discussing Roberto Bolano’s work or a classic film. In one of my favorite parts she visits Fernando Pessoa’s house in Lisbon, and examines his personal library. He was a fascinating poet who wrote under his own name and 75 others, which he called heteronyms, creating full lives for each alternate personality.

In my classes on story structure, I’ve begun including a section on experimental structures. I tend to prefer more linear stories when I’m reading, but Jane Alison‘s book Meander, Spiral, Explode has helped me better appreciate other patterns and also to recognise them in stories that I’ve loved.

This memoir is definitely a meander, perhaps one of the hardest structures because it still has to hold together even as it wanders in a seemingly random fashion. Smith makes the challenge even greater by moving in and out of dreams and memory. As in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, the margins are fluid. Smith moves deftly between the humorous, banal, or wrenching moments that make up her year, finds signs and portents in unexpected places, and stumbles upon strange happenings.

I listened to the audiobook narrated by the author. Her distinctive voice—the audible one—carried me even deeper into the experience than I believe her authorly voice alone would have. I mostly listened to it as I was falling asleep. Thus, with the membrane between sleep and waking so permeable, the surreal turns and dream logic seemed fitting.

I’d like to read it again and study more closely how she made it all work.

What book have you read recently that you immediately wanted to reread?

“The Practice,” by Barbara O’Neal

by

Screen Shot 2022-07-25 at 12.14.40 PM

This blog of mine grew out of a reading journal I had been keeping at the recommendation of the marvelous writer and teacher Jewell Parker Rhodes in her craft book Free Within Ourselves: Fiction Lessons for Black Authors. Its lessons on writing craft are honed by exercises and illustrated by story examples and analyses, making it a treasure for all authors.

In the reading journal I jotted down three things that I, as a writer, learned from reading each book. I found the exercise so useful that when I started this blog, I decided to review books with a slant toward what writing lessons I took away from it. Thus the blog would be useful to writers because of that slant, and to readers who, as I often hear in book clubs or discussions, can’t always identify why they particularly like or dislike a book or some aspect of it. A little understanding of the elements of creative writing can help both writers and readers deepen their appreciation of the stories they engage with.

Just as I consumed Jewell’s book, I continue to learn more about my craft. I read a lot, obviously. I take workshops, read craft books, listen to podcasts, and follow useful websites. One of the best websites for writers is WriterUnboxed.com. With a large group of contributors, the daily posts are a goldmine of craft lessons, inspiration, and supportive ideas.

This post by Barbara O’Neal so moved me that I now reread it as part of my prewriting routine at least weekly. The opening quote from Annie Dillard hit me where it hurts: “How you spend your days is how you spend your life.” How often have I procrastinated, knowing that any deadlines are of my own making?

I urge you to read the full post here. I’ll just say that the author acknowledges all her excellent reasons for skipping that day’s writing whether it is garden chores calling or a potential lunch date with a friend. As she says, “something always gets in the way of writing.”

Yet writing, she says, is a practice like meditation or journaling. The only way to do it is to just do it. Let each day’s work add to yesterday’s. In the gentlest way possible, she reminds us that “practice” is not just a noun; it is also a verb. No matter how much I want to be able to play the Courante from Handel’s Piano Suite in E minor, I’ll never be able to unless I actually work on it. And keep working on it. I’ll never finish this novel unless I keep working on it.

I don’t want to get to the end of my days and find that I have procrastinated them away. It’s fine to take a day of rest now and then. It’s necessary to take a walk and water the garden. Yet I cannot forget my practice. And I’m grateful to Barbara O’Neal for this reminder. Read it for yourself.

What is your practice?

Memorial Drive, by Natasha Trethewey

by

Memorial Drive

Trethewey is one of my favorite poets, so I looked forward to reading her memoir. Not needing to know anything more than the author’s name, I plunged in, only to emerge finally, astonished and awed.

With a poet’s concision and musicality, she conjures her rural Southern childhood, the move to Atlanta, and the terrible path to her mother’s murder when Trethewey was only 19. The girl’s response was to bury all memory of the years in Atlanta, the good and the bad. The woman’s self-appointed task is to unearth them and find again her lost mother.

And she does. With just a few deft strokes she summons her mother to life. I felt immediately that I knew this young woman, now divorced, leaving Mississippi for a new life with her young daughter. I felt the bond between mother and daughter, all the stronger for their separation from the close family and community back in Mississippi.

One way the author effects this revival is to include her mother’s own words, searched for and now recovered. Also, she gives us the context of the time: the early 1980s when the bitter segregation of her childhood is giving way finally to new opportunities for people of color and for women in particular, the excitement, the whiff of freedom in the air.

There’s no melodrama or sensationalism in this account. Trethewey’s voice is quiet—quiet as Black women’s voices have had to be. Yet with all that, her voice carries the emotions held in check by her composure, a tribute to the author’s exquisite use of language.

Trethewey weaves into her story the effects of being a child of a mixed marriage—her father White and her mother Black—and of growing up amid the racism of the South. She looks at how these experiences and the lasting trauma of her mother’s death have influenced her own growth as a writer.

In doing so, she has created a moving exploration of memory and of how we manage, or fail to manage, our painful past. My friend Susan Mills’s debut novel On the Wings of a Hummingbird also explores this theme: how do we an individuals, as a community recover from or at least deal with terrible suffering? So I’ve been thinking about it a lot, especially now when it seems nearly impossible to wrest reconciliation from sorrow.

In Atlanta, Trethewey and her mother lived on Memorial Drive. You can’t make these things up. This book is more than a memorial to her mother, more than a memoir, more than a masterclass in writing. It is a searing look at the lasting effects of racism and domestic abuse. And it is an invitation to think about our own losses and how they have shaped us.

Have you read a memoir that made you reflect on your own life?

This Time Next Year We’ll Be Laughing, by Jacqueline Winspear

by

Winspear

I thoroughly enjoyed this engaging memoir from the author of the Maisie Dobbs mystery series. Some of the themes and settings will be familiar to readers of those novels. Here, Winspear deftly adds family stories to her own memories of growing up in a working-class family in post-war England.

It is the war, both wars, that color their lives. Her grandfather’s shellshock from the Great War makes him hard to live with, panicking at the sound of a dropped pan. Her father, who could never bear loud noises, was assigned to an explosives team during WWII, while her mother as a child was evacuated during the Blitz. Jacqueline grew up listening to her mother’s stories “of war, of abuse at the hands of the people to whom she and her sisters had been billeted when evacuated from London, of seeing the dead following a bombing.”

Most fascinating for me are Jacqueline’s parents, colorful characters whose zest for life keeps them moving around, cash-poor but rich in love for family and the English countryside. Their mutual yearning for adventure prompts them to live with Romany travelers in between years-long forays out of London for life in rural Kent. The title comes from one of her endlessly optimistic father’s sayings.

As farmworkers, they are lucky to be given shacks to live in, which they make furniture for and fix up as best they can. Young Jacqueline joins them in picking hops and fruit when she is not exploring the fields and copses, often with her younger brother. The lessons of loving that she learns as a child from her hard-working parents—their patience with the shellshocked grandfather, their forgiveness of each other after the rare rows, their careful tending of the land—bear fruit in her own affectionate portrayal of them and their world in this book.

We learn about what inspired her to become a writer, a scene I recognised as similar to my own. And we learn a lot about her writing process as we perceive how she has made use of scenes from her life in her novels. She also shares the process of sorting through her memories, confirming some with research and finding others to be inaccurate.

This memoir doesn’t romanticise the sometimes harsh conditions and doesn’t shy away from the illnesses, accidents and other misfortunes that plague the family. Still, this is a charming read, even if you are not familiar with the novels. I was at times reminded of Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie, though that is from an earlier period, just after WWI and is more about village life than Winspear’s childhood on various farms.

I relished this vivid and evocative portrait of a writer’s life, a working-class life in a world far removed from today. I loved getting to know her parents and sharing, however briefly, in where their adventurous spirits led them.

Have you read Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs novels?

Barracoon, by Zora Neale Hurston

by

barrac

After reading The Confessions of Nat Turner, a fictional account of the leader of the 1831 slave uprising, I wanted to read a first person account from someone who had been a slave. This slim book, subtitled The Story of the Last “Black Cargo,” fits the bill.

I was already familiar with Hurston from her novels, such as Their Eyes Were Watching God, and knew she had studied with the pioneering anthropologist Franz Boas. Here, she combines her anthropologist and storyteller skills to give us the story of Cudjo Lewis in his own words.

Born in the town of Banté in West Africa, Kossola, as he was known then, was captured by the Dahomey when they destroyed his town, taking the teenager and others to sell as slaves. At the time Hurston interviewed him in 1927, he was thought to be the only person still alive who had made the gruesome Middle Passage from Africa to the United States. His was the last group of slaves to make that journey.

A storyteller in the griot tradition, Kossola describes what life was like in his town, including marriage customs, how murderers are punished, and his own training to be a man. He tells of the Dahomey raid—“ ‘I see de people gittee kill so fast! De old ones dey try run ‘way from de house but dey dead by de door, and de women soldiers got dey head’”—and the long march to Dahomey where they are kept in the barracoon, or barracks, until the White slave traders come.

Hurston captures his voice by representing his dialect. Although I usually tire easily when trying to read dialect, I had no trouble here, easily falling into Kossola’s voice. The dialect adds authenticity to his story.

Dey takee de chain off us and placee us in de boats . . . When we ready to leave de Kroo boat and go in de ship, de Many-costs [a derisive term for the Kroos, an African tribe that works for the white men, called that because many of them can be hired for the cost of a good worker] snatch our country cloth off us. We try save our clothes, we ain’ used to be without no clothes on. But dey snatch all off us. Dey say, ‘You get plenty clothes where you goin’.’ Oh Lor’, I so shame! We come in de ‘Merica soil naked and de people say we naked savages. Dey say we doan wear no clothes. Dey doan know de Many-costs snatch our clothes ‘way from us.

He goes on to describe his life as a slave, which lasted a little over five years, and after abolition, when he and the other slaves who had been brought on the Clotilda, those who hadn’t been sold elsewhere, built a town for themselves that they called African Town, today a community known as Africatown or Plateau, Alabama.

Religion is important to him and he is active in his church. He doesn’t see a disconnect between the faith of his childhood and the Christianity he learned in Alabama. He says that they worshiped the same god back in Africa, though they called him Alahua. Because they couldn’t read the Bible, they didn’t know he had a son.

This is not a traditional slave narrative, the story of an enslaved person escaping, trying to survive in the wilderness as they struggle to reach a place where they will be free. Instead, it starts with a free man, captured at 19 by fellow Africans and sold to White slavers—a fact that startled Hurston who had not realised that Black people were as responsible for the slave trade as White.

Hurston gives us a man who, despite the trauma and tragedies of his past, is someone much like us: retired, working in his garden, enjoying a good peach. We feel his love for his wife and their grief over the loss of two of their three children. His words touch us, especially his heartsick knowledge that he will now never see Africa again. He hopes that someday someone will carry his words back to that town in Africa where people will recognise his name and welcome him home.

This is a remarkable primary source for a time before any of us were born. Hurston completed the book in 1931, but it was rejected by publishers, partly because of the dialect. It was not published until 2018.

Do you ever pair two books that you’re reading, so that one complements the other?

The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson

by

Warmth

In 1937 Ida Mae Gladney left Mississippi for Chicago. In 1945 George Starling left Florida for New York City. In 1953 Robert Pershing Foster left Louisiana for Los Angeles.

They were part of the Great Migration. From 1915 to 1970 almost six million Black citizens left the south for northern and western cities looking for better lives. For the first time Wilkerson’s monumental book gives us a history of this remarkable movement.

The book is long but eminently readable, due to Wilkerson’s approach. By closely following stories of three individuals, she captures the reader’s attention and sympathy and keeps us turning pages. There are historical sections complete with supporting statistics, but these are kept to a minimum and related to the stories we’re following. The author brings all the tools of fiction to keep us interested in this meticulously researched history.

World War I is usually considered to precipitating cause of the Great Migration. Black soldiers serving in the military and in Europe discovered that it was possible to escape Jim Crow. At the same time, factories and businesses in the north and west were desperate for workers since the flow of immigrants had basically halted and the military claimed many of the remaining men.

The scope of the Great Migration was not recognised for a long time. The effects were felt locally, in cities such as Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, New York, but it wasn’t until southern businesses found they could no longer hire enough Black workers—whose wages had been kept artificially low by Jim Crow laws and local corruption—that the outcry began.

The last part of the book, almost one hundred pages, includes Wilkerson’s notes on her methodology, acknowledgments, endnotes and index, attesting to the solid underpinning of research. She says:

This book is essentially three projects in one. The first was a collection of oral histories from around the country. The second was the distillation of those oral histories into a narrative of three protagonists . . . The third was an examination of newspaper accounts and scholarly and literary works of the era and more recent analysis of the Migration to recount the motivations, circumstances, and perceptions of the Migration as it was in progress and to put the subjects’ actions into historical context.

It is that historical context that is the takeaway I most value from this book. Much of the information here was not new to me. Yet what stands out is how I now have a framework for all the pieces that I was already familiar with. I felt them slotting into place as I read.

One area I wish Wilkerson had covered in more depth, though obviously there wasn’t room for it, is the Black communities that flourished during segregation and then dissipated, partly through “urban renewal” demolitions and partly through integration. Wilkerson mentions it briefly in a few places, such as speaking of Harlem’s rise and fall. Robert Foster’s story, too, shows it in microcosm: as he aged, he left his prosperous private practice, where he was popular among his mostly Black patients, to join the staff of a Veterans’ Hospital. He missed being in charge and disliked having to answer to higher-ups who he believed discriminated against him, eventually forcing him out.

I will remember Robert’s story as well as those of Ida Mae and George for a long time. They brought to life the indignities of the Jim Crow South they fled and the different kinds of injustice and prejudice they found in their sanctuary cities, far worse than the discrimination that immigrants from other countries faced. Through these individuals, I have a better understanding of the people around me.

What nonfiction have you been reading?