I think Isabel Wilkerson’s writing just isn’t for me.  there’s an ungodly amount of repetition in this book and it seems like it just wasn’t properly edited.  She did SO much research for this project and then presented it in a disjointed and fairly convoluted manner. It would have helped to either split up each of the three narratives into distinct sections OR for her to go through everything in chronological order, interspersing the wider context with the personal interviews. I disliked Caste for very similar reasons — except that book was even more repetitive. There’s only so many redundant topic sentences one casual reader can take, you know?  If you were worried we forgot the same basic biographical information we’ve been told several times already, maybe it would be prudent to edit it for length … then we’d read faster and have less time to forget it in the first place. 

I do think that the choice to follow three different people who represented larger trends was a good one, I just wished it was organized as a narrative with more of a natural flow and structure. I’ll stick to listening to Wilkerson’s podcast appearances in the future (which she is actually very good at). 

5 star information/research presented in a 2 star format = 3.5 I guess