The Warmth of Other Suns
The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Penguin Books Ltd
Published:4th Aug '20
Should be back in stock very soon
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
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...
A narrative epic rigorous enough to impress all but the crankiest of scholars, yet so immensely readable as to land the author a future place on Oprah's couch. -- David Oshinsky, The New York Times Book Review
Told in a voice that echoes the magic cadences of Toni Morrison or the folk wisdom of Zora Neale Hurston's collected oral histories, Wilkerson's book pulls not just the expanse of the migration into focus but its overall impact on politics, literature, music, sports -- in the nation and the world. -- Lynell George * Los Angeles Times *
Scholarly but very readable, this book, for all its rigor, is so absorbing, it should come with a caveat: Pick it up only when you can lose yourself entirely. * O, The Oprah Magazine *
Profound, necessary and an absolute delight to read. -- Toni Morrison
Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns is an American masterpiece, a stupendous literary success that channels the social sciences as iconic biography in order to tell a vast story of a people's reinvention of itself and of a nation--the first complete history of the Great Black Migration from start to finish, north, east, west. -- David Levering Lewis
Not since Alex Haley's Roots has there been a history of equal literary quality where the writing surmounts the rhythmic soul of fiction, where the writer's voice sings a song of redemptive glory as true as Faulkner's southern cantatas. -- The San Francisco Examiner
[A] sweeping history of the Great Migration... The Warmth of Other Suns builds upon such purely academic works to make the migrant experience both accessible and emotionally compelling. -- NPR.org
One of the most lyrical and important books of the season -- David Shribman * Boston Globe *
A seminal work of narrative nonfiction. . . . You will never forget these people. -- Gay Talese
A landmark piece of nonfiction...sure to hold many surprises for readers of any race or experience...A mesmerizing book that warrants comparison to The Promised Land, Nicholas Lemann's study of the Great Migration's early phase, and Common Ground, J. Anthony Lukas's great, close-range look at racial strife in Boston...[Wilkerson's] closeness with, and profound affection for, her subjects reflect her deep immersion in their stories and allow the reader to share that connection. -- Janet Maslin * The New York Times *
ISBN: 9780141995151
Dimensions: 198mm x 130mm x 31mm
Weight: 440g
640 pages