The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

· Sold by Vintage
4.8
52 reviews
Ebook
640
Pages
Eligible

About this ebook

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In this beautifully written masterwork, the Pulitzer Prize–winnner and bestselling author of Caste chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life.

“Profound, necessary and an absolute delight to read.” —Toni Morrison


From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves.
 
With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story 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, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties.

Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as 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 the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is destined to become a classic.

Ratings and reviews

4.8
52 reviews
A Google user
October 18, 2012
Ida Mae Brandon Gladney was my Great Grandma & I spent countless days w/ her once my father passed & she would always tell me stories as a child & I thought I knew everything there was too know about her. After reading this book I realize she told me the good things in life that happened to her. She never told me about the awful things she endured growing up in Mississippi. My Great Grandma is a true inspiration to me & our whole family now. We miss her sooo much because she was the Rock of our family.
1 person found this review helpful
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Auntee Teen
September 5, 2022
Good read, but horrible treatment of an oppressed people. See how the Caste system of old kept slavery alive long after it should have died.
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Sydney Stevenson
August 21, 2017
The Warmth of other Suns....... This book serves as a source for a part of history that is not often told. This book gives us great first-hand stories about the black exodus in the United States. A must read in my honest opinion.
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About the author

ISABEL WILKERSON won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her reporting as Chicago bureau chief of The New York Times. The award made her the first black woman in the history of American journalism to win a Pulitzer Prize and the first African American to win for individual reporting. She won the George Polk Award for her coverage of the Midwest and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for her research into the Great Migration. She has lectured on narrative writing at the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University and has served as Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University and as the James M. Cox Jr. Professor of Journalism at Emory University. She is currently Professor of Journalism and Director of Narrative Nonfiction at Boston University. During the Great Migration, her parents journeyed from Georgia and southern Virginia to Washington, D.C., where she was born and reared. This is her first book.

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