The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson is an epic American masterpiece. In this impressive, wonderfully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the amazing untold stories of Us history: the decades-long migration of Black citizens who fled the Southern region for northern and western cities, in search of a better life.

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER
LYNTON HISTORY PRIZE WINNER
HEARTLAND AWARD WINNER
DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE FINALIST

The Warmth of Other Suns

NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS  OF THE YEAR BY

The New York Times USA Today O: The Oprah Magazine Amazon Publishers Weekly Salon Newsday The Daily Beast

The Warmth of Other Suns was named one of the best books of the year by 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, and The Christian Science Monitor

From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of nearly six million people changed the facial skin of The us. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples ever sold. She questioned more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to create this conclusive and strongly impressive account of how these American journeys unfolded, transforming our cities, our country, and ourselves.

With amazing historical detail, Wilkerson tells this account by way of the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, George Starling, and Robert Foster. In 1937 Gladney 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, in 1945, fled Florida for Harlem. There he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God.

Robert Foster left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career as the personal physician of Ray Charles. His glitteringly successful medical career allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties.

In The Warmth of Other Suns, Wilkerson superbly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country journeys by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, and also how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work.

Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, 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 individuals and lives portrayed herein, this book is destined to become classic.