RaveThe Wall Street Journal... a brilliant and stirring epic, the first book to cover the full half-century of the Great Migration ... Wilkerson combines impressive research with great narrative and literary power ... she humanizes history, giving it emotional and psychological depth. She is especially good at capturing the experiential sense of life in the poor South and of the migration itself. Few histories better convey the grueling repetition required to pick 100 pounds of cotton a day for 50 cents. She gets inside the heads the people she\'s writing about and gives readers a penetrating sense of what it felt like to be a part of the vast move north ... To her credit, Ms. Wilkerson refuses to romanticize the people whose stories she tells. She highlights their flaws and failures as well as their successes.
David W. Blight
RaveThe Wall Street Journal\"Mr. Blight’s biography deserves full immersion. Though long, it is absorbing and even moving, and the payoff is enormous, for Mr. Blight displays his lifelong interest in Douglass on almost every page, and his own voice is active and eloquent throughout the narrative. It is a book that speaks to our own time as well as Douglass’s... It is a brilliant book.\
Steven Hahn
RaveThe Wall Street Journal...an impressive synthesis of the United States in the 19th century ... Mr. Hahn redefines the sectional crisis that led to the Rebellion. It was 'not between the North and the South,' he argues, but between the antislavery Northeast and the slaveholding regions of the Mississippi Valley ... A Nation Without Borders is a detailed, dense and at times depressing book. Depressing because Mr. Hahn begins his story in 1830, with slaveholders ascendant, and ends in 1910, with industrialists triumphant ... his chronicle is breathtaking in its scope and brilliant in its subtle and original conceptualization of the nation during this period. It is often affecting, too, especially in its descriptions of labor activism.
