Appreciation post: the footnotes in "The Warmth of Other Suns" blew my mind

I'm in a book club that's been debating this book for weeks, and I started digging into the footnotes. Found out that between 1915 and 1970, around 6 million Black people moved from the South to other parts of the US, which is way more than I thought. The author Isabel Wilkerson cites census data and interviews from people in places like Chicago and Los Angeles that she tracked down. Has anyone else found a stat from a nonfiction book that totally shifted how you saw a topic?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_faith2h ago

1909 was the year my grandpa's family left Mississippi for Detroit. I looked up the census records once and got my math all wrong, proved myself wrong on accident.

fionat554h ago

Argue the opposite here. Found those footnotes more distracting than enlightening. Pulled numbers from census data and old interviews, but numbers alone don't tell you much about the real human experience of that migration. The book uses big round numbers to make the story feel more important than it needs to be. Honestly felt like the author was showing off her research instead of letting the people's stories speak for themselves. A good book tells you the story without needing a bunch of footnotes to prove the facts are right. Sometimes less research on the page makes for a better read overall.

craig.parker1h ago

@fionat55 do you think footnotes always hurt a book like this or just when they lean too hard on numbers? Curious if you would've felt differently if the footnotes were more about personal letters or diary entries.