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.
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.*****
