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deejoe@bookwyrm.social

Joined 2 years, 11 months ago

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Isabel Wilkerson, Robin Miles: The warmth of other suns (2011, Vintage Books) 5 stars

In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the …

Surfacing a piece of white-suppressed history

5 stars

Wilkerson rescues and presents a crucial piece of 20th century history in a way both thorough and engaging. The backbone of the book is a braid of three biographies she has selected from a wider range of interviews and sources, well footnoted throughout for anyone who wants to inspect the receipts or to step further. The book succeeds on the strength of those biographies alone, but goes much further, lifting up the lives of all who participated in the Great Migration, telling again the timeless story of perserverance in the face of hardship and injustice, made new through the particulars. This centers the essential human story from the Jim Crow years in a way that a focus on Jim Crow never could. This reviewer learned the white-centered counterparts to this story, one of "forced bussing" and "white flight" and government "meddling", and found this not just a welcome correction, but …

So of course this isn't about the book so much as about the collective cultural phenomenon, lol. Sorry.

I probably should re-read it at some point, now, decades and at least half a lifetime of experience later.

(there's also an idea for the software: in addition to "want to read" maybe also a "want to re-read" that becomes available for anything that someone marks as already having read.)

J.R.R. Tolkien: The Hobbit (Paperback, 2014, HarperCollins Publishers) 4 stars

This is the story of how a Baggins had an adventure, and found himself doing …

The Hobbit

4 stars

What's to be said about this that hasn't already been said? I guess my personal experience was that I saw the Ralph Bakshi animated treatment of this before ever reading it. Then, I got this huge coffee-table style book out of the library with the story but printed around cels from the animation. So, my experience of the whole thing was very colored from the beginning that way. Eventually I got a box set of the paperbacks on loan from an uncle of the LOTR and struggled through them with long periods where they just sat on the shelf. Probably my first experience of executive dysfunction/guilt around something I felt I should read but just hadn't gotten around to yet and often didn't feel like wanting to read it. The Jackson movies are fine and a welcome visual palate cleanser for the Bakshi images. I don't think I've seen all …