The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
About this ebook
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR
TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE ONE
OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’S FIVE BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY
A KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE CENTURY
LOS ANGELES TIMES’S #1 NONFICTION BOOK OF THE LAST 30 YEARS
AN OPRAH DAILY BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE PAST TWO DECADES
'A brilliant and stirring epic . . . Ms. Wilkerson does for the Great Migration what John Steinbeck did for the Okies in his fiction masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath; she humanizes history, giving it emotional and psychological depth' John Stauffer, The Wall Street Journal
'What she’s done with these oral histories is stow memory in amber' Lynell George, Los Angeles Times
WINNER: The Mark Lynton History Prize The Anisfield-Wolf Award for Nonfiction The Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize The Hurston-Wright Award for Nonfiction The Hillman Prize for Book Journalism NAACP Image Award for Best Literary Debut Stephen Ambrose Oral History Prize
FINALIST: The PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Dayton Literary Peace Prize
ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, O: The Oprah Magazine, Salon, Newsday, The Daily Beast
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Economist, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Entertainment Weekly, Philadelphia Inquirer, The Guardian, The Seattle Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Christian Science Monitor
From 1915 to 1970, an exodus of almost six million people would change the face of America. With stunning historical detail, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson gives us this definitive, vividly dramatic account of how these journeys unfolded.
Based on interviews with more than a thousand people, and access to new data and official records, The Warmth of Other Suns tells the story of America's Great Migration through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career.
Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country journeys, as well as how they changed their new homes forever.
'You will never forget these people' Gay Talese
'The mass migration of African Americans out of the US south forever changed the country's cultural fabric - and Wilkerson's history of this period is full of sacrifice and hope ... a long overdue account' Lettecha Johnson, Guardian
'A deeply affecting, finely crafted and heroic book. . . .Wilkerson has taken on one of the most important demographic upheavals of the past century and told it through the lives of three people ... lyrical and tragic' Jill Lepore, New Yorker
