The Warmth of Other Suns
The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
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4.7 • 24 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • 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
In this beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson presents a definitive and dramatic account of one of the great untold stories of American history: the Great Migration of six million Black citizens who fled the South for the North and West in search of a better life, from World War I to 1970.
Wilkerson tells this interwoven story through the lives of three unforgettable protagonists: Ida Mae Gladney, a sharecropper’s wife, who in 1937 fled Mississippi for Chicago; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, and Robert Foster, a surgeon who left Louisiana in 1953 in hopes of making it in California.
Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous cross-country journeys by car and train and their new lives in colonies in the New World. The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is a modern classic.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a sharecropper's wife, left Mississippi for Milwaukee in 1937, after her cousin was falsely accused of stealing a white man's turkeys and was almost beaten to death. In 1945, George Swanson Starling, a citrus picker, fled Florida for Harlem after learning of the grove owners' plans to give him a "necktie party" (a lynching). Robert Joseph Pershing Foster made his trek from Louisiana to California in 1953, embittered by "the absurdity that he was doing surgery for the United States Army and couldn't operate in his own home town." Anchored to these three stories is Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Wilkerson's magnificent, extensively researched study of the "great migration," the exodus of six million black Southerners out of the terror of Jim Crow to an "uncertain existence" in the North and Midwest. Wilkerson deftly incorporates sociological and historical studies into the novelistic narratives of Gladney, Starling, and Pershing settling in new lands, building anew, and often finding that they have not left racism behind. The drama, poignancy, and romance of a classic immigrant saga pervade this book, hold the reader in its grasp, and resonate long after the reading is done.
Customer Reviews
This story should be part of American History!
This book really open my eyes about the Great Migration period into USA. I had never heard of it until il I read this book. The Great Migration is about the displacement of African Americans from the South to the Northern and Western part of the USA. Most southerners left during the World War I period (1910) up to 1970. An estimated 6 million people migrated to the north fleeing the Jim Crow segregated south in hopes to find freedom to pursue a better life for themselves and their descendants. The history is told by 3 distinct people who migrated at different times and for different reasons. We meet Dr Foster who leaves the south in order to practice medicine freely and pursue better opportunities for his career in LA,California. We meet George who leaves the South to escape being lynched from Florida to Harlem, NY.And we meet Ida Mae who leaves the south out of fear with her husband from Mississippi to Chicago to leave the restrictives laws of segregation and violence in the south. All three people had their own motives to leave everything they have knowledge to start anew within a country that failed to give them rights in the south. The North was no paradise either. I found many parallels with the immigrants story who leave everything behind in the hopes of a better future in the promised land. African American history is American history and human history as you see how much the Great Migration contributed to our society at large, nation and internationally. I’m grateful to have read this book as it makes me appreciate my own parents migration story that is so easy to forget.