Isabel Wilkerson made quite an impression when she spoke on the First Author/First Book panel at ALA Annual this year. Her book, which arrives next week, is also making an impression.

About the migration of African Americans to the North between 1915 and 1970, it’s on the cover of the 9/12 NYT Book Review, after already receiving attention in the daily NYT (the  daily newspaper’s book reviews and the Sunday Book Review are separate entities, with separate staffs and reporting structures; something people forget when they complain about the NYT covering the same title twice) and many other sources.

Wilkerson won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing at the NYT; this is her first book. The NYT BR says,

…written in broad imaginative strokes, this book, at 622 pages, is something of an anomaly in today’s shrinking world of nonfiction publishing: a narrative epic rigorous enough to impress all but the crankiest of scholars, yet so immensely readable as to land the author a future place on Oprah’s couch.

Wilkerson is aso interviewed in a podcast by NYT BR Editor Sam Tanenhaus.

The book is rising on Amazon’s sales rankings; it is now at #37.

NYT Daily — Janet Maslin

Entertainment Weekly gives it an unequivocal  A

The Economist, Black migration in America: From hominy grits to cold shoulder

New Yorker, Chronicling the Great Migration

The Wall Street Journal, The Great Northern Migration

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 4th, 2010 at 3:17 pm and is filed under 2010 - Fall, History, Nonfiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.