Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I would give this book a thousand stars if I could. I'm very grateful to the author and everyone she interviewed for sharing these stories with me. This book has deeply affected me. Others have reviewed the content, writing style and extensive research. My comments are of a more personal nature. Until I read this book I would have told you I (a white Southern woman in her 50s) was particularly well-informed about the experience of African Americans, having read almost all of the authors she quoted in the book and many she didn't, including Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston and more contemporary authors, having studied the civil rights movement from my armchair and seeking out African American theater, arts, and friends. I was wrong. I was ignorant. I didn't know about the Great Migration. I had picked up bits and pieces of the extent of Jim Crow from my reading, and I had read them from the perspective of someone who wanted to draw from their experience without being, apparently, very curious about the context of it. This book, these stories, opened my eyes by putting the experiences in chronological order and in context. Without ever being maudlin, divisive, or melodramatic, the author struck a tone that allowed the reader, me, to feel the power of these stories. The author did a great service to the people she interviewed and her readers by allowing us to decide how we feel about these stories. She confidently and brilliantly presented them in a matter-of-fact manner and in the exact words of the person describing their own experience, trusting, correctly that their emotional impact would not be missed. By focusing on every day experiences rather than sweeping generalities, the book allowed me to see the insidious and pervasive nature of Jim Crow, how it affected every moment of every day, how no action could be too insignificant to be viewed as a threat to the social order and therefore to involve the risk of one's life. I had no idea that it was illegal for black people to work outside the cotton fields or orange groves, nor did I have any idea it was so dangerous to leave the south. These lives and stories are deeply, deeply affecting. It helped (although it hurt emotionally) to simultaneously read The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander and The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay, a novel about apartheid in South Africa. I personally thank the author and everyone she interviewed. Deepest gratitude.