Book Analysis: The Warmth of Other Suns
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation
Book Analysis: The Warmth of Other Suns
Imagine being faced with a decision of leaving your current life and set out to a place far away in search of a better life. It is a choice that would resonate as tough for many people given our human nature of being social attached to people and things in our environment. It would simply be a heartbreaking decision to make as it to know that several decades ago our descendants were faced with this similar decision of abandoning all they knew in search of a better new. In her book The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson gives an epic account on how approximately six million African Americans made a decision to leave their oppressive lives behind in search of new better lives. The book narrates a story of the Great Migration that took place between the periods of the World War I until the 1970s. African American migrated from the south to the north and West. This non-fictional book introduces the world to a historical event that later shaped the dynamics of the modern day American society.
In her book, Wilkerson does a great work in navigating poverty, prosperity, hope, and despair as the theoretical frameworks in her text. In the south, African American were subjected to a caste system referred to as Jim Crow. This system put people in a position where what they could do was based on their racial status. Jim Crow rules put African Americans in a disadvantaged position where poverty was their way of life and prosperity seemed to be nothing but a pipe dream. The rules were only put in place to maintain the economic status quo where African American were used as a source of cheap labor. Misery was the order of the day for the African American under the Jim Crow system. All they were left with was hope for a better future. Poverty, prosperity, hope and despair unfolds clearly in evaluating freedom, racism, and migration which are three major issues addressed in the book.
