The best nonfiction of this century so far, and it isn't close.

As I said in issue 12, and again in issue 19, and possibly at a wedding: this is the book I point at when somebody tells me nonfiction can't do character.

Three people. Ida Mae Gladney leaving Mississippi in 1937, George Starling out of Florida with men behind him, Robert Foster driving west with nowhere between Texas and California that will give him a bed. Wilkerson interviewed something like a thousand people and then had the discipline to cut it down to three — a cut almost nobody in this discipline is willing to make. Six million people, three kitchens.

The Foster drive is the section everyone quotes and they are right to. A surgeon, an army officer, money in his pocket, and he cannot find a motel that will take him; the exhaustion goes from irritating to frightening to something close to a medical emergency, and she simply lets the miles pile up. No commentary. She has earned the right to skip the commentary.

What I noticed on a second pass is the structure. Three timelines across five decades and you are never lost. Chapter lengths vary by feel rather than by plan. She breaks away from Ida Mae at precisely the moment you want more of her, every time.

Two things the reception undersold. It's funny, in the way people are funny about their own families. And it argues, quietly and with receipts, against the sociology of the sixties and seventies about who these migrants were and what became of them. There is an entire academic fight buried in those endnotes, conducted very politely.

Ten. Buy the hardback; the paperback binding gives up somewhere around Chicago.