The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of Americas Great Migration

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER ONE OF BARACK OBAMAS FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR TIMES TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMESS FIVE BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY A KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE CENTURY LOS ANGELES TIMESS #1 NONFICTION BOOK OF THE LAST 30 YEARS AN OPRAH DAILY BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE PAST TWO DECADESA 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 JournalWhat shes done with these oral histories is stow memory in amber.Lynell George, Los Angeles TimesWINNER: The Mark Lynton History Prize The AnisfieldWolf Award for Nonfiction The Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize The HurstonWright Award for Nonfiction The Hillman Prize for Book Journalism NAACP Image Award for Best Literary Debut Stephen Ambrose Oral History PrizeFINALIST: The PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Dayton Literary Peace PrizeONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, O: The Oprah Magazine, Salon, Newsday, The Daily BeastONE 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 PostDispatch, The Christian Science MonitorIn this beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prizewinning 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 sharecroppers wife, who in 1937 fled Mississippi for Chicago; sharp and quicktempered 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 crosscountry 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.