by Isabel Wilkerson
I did a lot of skimming, skipping most of the historical digressions in favor of the three life stories. I can appreciate this as a piece of reporting, but no way is this the second best book of the century. It was so repetitive. Wilkerson will tell you the exact same thing mere pages apart. “She had heard that they strapped women down during delivery” (page 245). “She had heard that up north, doctors strapped women down when they went into labor” (page 267). Within two pages, “their respective corners of the echoing mansion… feeling too small for two people so different from each other,” and “that so full a house would come down to just these two,” and “marooned in a house that was too big, but not big enough to escape each other.” This isn’t great writing to me.
Tytania 