The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

Despite growing up near Detroit, spending a decade of my life in Chicago, then spending another 16 years in the American South (Texas and Florida), my knowledge of Black history is pretty pathetic. I'm really trying to educate myself about BIPOC issues and authors, and dove into another Big Summer Book a couple of weeks ago. It's a fairly long book, more than 500 pages of text, but the stories are so compelling and the writing is so good that I could hardly put it down and finished it in less than a week.

The Warmth of Other Suns is the kind of history book I love, non-fiction that reads like fiction. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson interweaves the narrative story of three different African-Americans who leave the South in the first half of the century, part of the Great Migration. From 1915 to 1970, approximately 6 million African-Americans left the South, migrating North and West, hoping for a better life for themselves and their families in states without Jim Crow laws. Wilkerson shares the stories of three people: Ida Mae Gladney, a pregnant sharecropper, stealthily leaves Mississippi in 1937 with her husband and two children to Wisconsin and then Chicago; George Starling leaves the orange groves of Central Florida in 1945 and becomes a Pullman porter based in Harlem; and surgeon Robert Foster leaves for California in 1953, since even his medical degree and experience as an Army doctor fail to protect him from prejudice and discrimination in his home state of Louisiana.

All three have very different stories, but they're equally absorbing and often horrifying. A neighbor of Ida Mae was nearly beaten to death when he's believed to have stolen some missing turkeys (who were merely roosting in a different part of the nearby woods). George tries to organize a strike of  fruit pickers working for pennies a box in dangerous conditions during the height of demand in WWII, and has to leave town after he hears a rumor he's about to be lynched. Dr. Foster works for years as a surgeon on a U.S. Army base in Austria, but he can't even find a motel for a night's rest as he drives for days on his Westbound route to California, even after leaving the South. Over and over there are stories of racial slurs, discrimination, and police brutality. Clearly, things haven't changed much.

Once they leave for the west and the north, all three still face discrimination, just less subtle. Practices of redlining prevent African-Americans from renting and buying, so they end up paying more for less, forcing them to live in crowded apartments and neighborhoods. Ida Mae and her husband are shut out of job after job. George Starling finally gets a backbreaking job as a train porter, but after years of service, is never promoted. Though a respected surgeon, Dr. Foster has to drive all over Los Angeles collecting urine samples for an insurance company to make enough money and contacts to set up his own practice.

The presence of so many black migrants elevated the status of other immigrants in the North and West. Black southerners stepped into a hierarchy that assigned them a station beneath everyone else, no matter that their families had been in the country for centuries. Their arrival unwittingly diverted anti-immigrant antagonisms their way, as they were an even less favored outsider group than the immigrants they encountered in the North and helped make formerly ridiculed groups more acceptable by comparison.

These incidents happened years ago, and it's still happening now. I'm appalled that I was never taught any of this in school -- and I grew up less than 30 miles from downtown Detroit. I didn't know that Chicago, a city in which I lived for almost ten years, is one of the most segregated in America, and has some of the most racist suburbs and the worst racial riots. I didn't know that one of the most racist cities in Florida was less than an hour from my in-laws retirement home, halfway between their house and Disney World. And I'd never heard of Juneteenth even though I lived in Texas for eleven years and my children were required by state law to take an entire year of Texas history. They were never taught it (and the Civil War was about the South "defending State's Rights." Some people still call it the War of Northern Aggression).

But this isn't about me, or my lack of education. I intend to from the real struggles and lived experiences Black Americans and other minorities are facing now and have been facing for years. I want to be a better reader and a better blogger, and read more books by BIPOC authors. I highly recommend The Warmth of Other Suns if you want to do the same. If you are looking for more suggestions, here is an anti-racist list by Ibram X. Kendi.

Terms and Conditions: I Am SO GLAD I Never Went to Boarding School

I grew up in a very dull middle-class Midwestern suburb, so I traveled the world vicariously through books. I adored reading anything set in a boarding school -- all the neat rows of beds, made up just so with hospital corners! Uniforms (so no one would judge my lack of fashionable wardrobe)! Communal living with cheerful girls called Bunny, who would naturally want to be my friend. 

OR SO I THOUGHT. Until I read Terms and Conditions: Life in Girls' Boarding Schools, 1939-1979 by Ysenda Maxtone Graham.

Published by Slightly Foxed back in 2016, this small volume of recollections about 20th century girls' boarding schools was all over my small corner of the blogosphere a couple of years ago. Naturally I HAD to have a copy, so I ordered this adorable book, a beautiful little hardcover (just the size to fit in a purse or pocket). Whereupon it then sat unread for a good two years until the TBR Pile Challenge behooved me to put it on this year's reading list. Spanning the years 1939 to 1979, this is a chatty, casual look at the lives of girls and young women in British boarding schools. 

The Slightly Foxed edition, available through their website. 

This book basically shattered all my childish fantasies about the delightful years I missed by taking the bus to my suburban public school -- in actuality, many of these girls were undereducated, bullied (by both students and staff) and constantly cold. So cold, in fact, that hot water bottles froze overnight. Inside the dormitories. 

Their stories both fascinated and horrified me. Though many of the young women interviewed have fond memories of school, and made deep, lifelong friendships, this book horrified me. In reality, it seems like many girls' boarding schools had sketchy education programs, bad food, and forced the students to spend hours running around cold, muddy fields playing lacrosse and tennis. If by some miracle I'd won a scholarship (or had a benefactor bequeath me a fortune for tuition) I would definitely NOT have fit in at one of these schools -- I'm bookish, bad at sports, and no connections to famous people or aristocrats. In short, life in a boarding school would have been absolute hell for me, as it was for some of the girls interviewed -- some of them ran away, and others seem traumatized for life. 

Don't get me wrong -- this is an entertaining read, and I feel like I have a better understanding of British culture and literature. It's been described as hilarious, and though there were parts that made me smile and laugh out loud, my reaction was to thank my lucky stars that I went to that dull suburban public school system. 

The Roedean School in East Sussex.

I bought my copy from Slightly Foxed, but it's also available in a paperback edition (pictured above). And just for fun, while researching images of British girls' boarding schools, I read the Wikipedia entry about the Roedean School, pictured above (other photos show the opposite side, situated dramatically above a cliff). Apparently many famous people attended Roedean, and it's also a fixture of literary and pop culture -- fictional Roedean students include characters from P. G. Wodehouse novels and my beloved Chummy from Call the Midwife. I can absolutely picture Chummy on the lacrosse field, can't you? 

Miranda Hart as Chummy.

This is my fourth book for the TBR Pile Challenge, and I'm also counting it as my book set in the U.K. for the European Reading Challenge. 

Demobbed: Coming Home After the Second World War by Alan Allport

The other day, I was working at the circulation desk at the library, and a patron returned a book that I really want to read, River of Doubt by Candice Millard.  When I asked how he liked it, he seemed a little dismissive.  "Well, I have a Ph.D in history," he said, basically implying that the book wasn't particularly academic in nature.  Now, I have been reading more and more nonfiction the past few years, and I even started a book group at my branch that reads only nonfiction.  I'm finding nonfiction to be better written and more accessible than ever before.  It never occurred to me that this could be considered a bad thing.  

However, my most recent nonfiction book was all of the above -- well-written, accessible, AND academic.  Demobbed: Coming Home After the Second World War by Alan Allport is a fascinating read about the lives of British soldiers (and to a lesser extent, civilians) during the period immediately after WWII, when millions of men returned home during peacetime after the war.  

I must admit I knew next to nothing about this when I started -- everything I know about postwar Britain is from TV series like Call the Midwife.  I did realize that food and gas rationing went on for years, but I am sure to myself, and many others, my first thoughts are about the soldiers returning home to ticker tape parades, kissing nurses in the streets, like the iconic Life magazine photo.

The book isn't terribly long, about 225 pages of narrative of text, but it's packed with information.  Here are a few facts that I learned:

• Logistically, returning soldiers home was complicated. It took months, even stretching to years for some of the British military. It takes a long time to get that many people from one place to another.  (If you've ever been on a cruise, you know how long it takes people to get OFF the ship. Try multiplying that exponentially.) 

• Because of the bombings and destruction on the home front, many civilians felt that they'd had an equally bad time than the soldiers who were fighting, or even worse. Many of them resented the returning soldiers. Soldiers were also shocked at the rationing and destruction once they'd returned.

• And of course, the issues of the mental health of many of the returning soldiers. I know there are infinitely more resources for returning veterans now, but it's shocking how bad it was after World War II. 

This book was extremely interesting and well-organized. In the introduction, Allport explains that this book was originally an academic thesis (it's published by the Yale University Press). Compared to most of the nonfiction I've been reading the last few years, Demobbed is definitely written in a more formal style than some of the nonfiction that I find on the library shelves, but it's still very accessible. I really enjoyed this book, especially compared to the disappointment of the previous book I read from my TBR Pile Challenge 2015 list. I highly recommend it for anyone who's interested in the postwar period. 

I still own two more nonfiction works about post-war Britain on the TBR shelves: Millions Like Us by Virginia Nicholson and Our Hidden Lives by Simon Garfield. Bloggers, have any of you read either of these? And what other books about WWII and postwar Britain do you recommend? 

Singled Out by Virginia Nicholson

About one million British men were killed during WWI -- and another 2 million wounded, almost 35% of their total forces.  A disproportionately large percentage of these men were officers.  This "lost generation" was devastating, not only because of the lives lost and ruined.  After the war, approximately 2 million women were left single, with no prospects for husbands or children.  Singled Out by Virginia Nicholson is the story of how those women coped during an era when the ultimate goal of most women was to get married and have a family.

This book is fairly short, but packed with information.  It must have been absolutely terrible -- for some women, especially in the upper classes, the ratio of available women to men was something like ten to one.  A higher proportion of upper-class men enlisted and were killed in the war, and most upper-class women couldn't or wouldn't marry down the social scale.  Many of them had few prospects, other than becoming teachers and governesses, and maiden aunts, during a time when being a spinster was the ultimate shame.

Nicholson's book describes a variety of women, some who became famous, like writer Vita Sackville-West and archaeologist Gertrude Caton-Thompson.  Some of the women in the book were able to use this terrible situation to break down barriers and pursue other careers and dreams, such as becoming doctors, lawyers, and businesswomen.  Though it's probably a fraction of many of the women who were left single and childless, it's a very interesting look at how the era and their situation contributed to the changing role of women in the early part of the century.  

This book was very interesting and well-written, and I especially like how the author organized the works mentioned at the end of the book -- she quoted from so many novels and biographies, it was nice to have them organized so I can go back and find them again easily (and add them to my to-read list!)

I highly recommend this book, especially if you're interested in social history and about the aftermath of WWI.  It's particularly timely because of the upcoming anniversary of the Great War.  And another book I can check off my 2015 TBR Pile list!