The Warmth of Other Suns

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 * The Warmth of Other Suns is a brilliant and stirring epic, the first book to cover the full half-century of the Great Migration... Wilkerson combines impressive research...with great narrative and literary power. 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 * Wall Street Journal * [A] deeply affecting, finely crafted and heroic book...Wilkerson has taken on one of the most important demographic upheavals of the past century-a phenomenon whose dimensions and significance have eluded many a scholar-and told it through the lives of three people no one has ever heard of...This is narrative nonfiction, lyrical and tragic and fatalist. The story exposes; the story moves; the story ends. What Wilkerson urges, finally, isn't argument at all; it's compassion. Hush, and listen. -- Jill Lepore * The New Yorker * [An] extraordinary and evocative work. * The Washington Post * Mesmerizing... * Chicago Tribune * [An] indelible and compulsively readable portrait of race, class, and politics in 20th-century America. History is rarely distilled so finely. Grade: A * Entertainment Weekly * An astonishing work...Isabel Wilkerson delivers!... With the precision of a surgeon, Wilkerson illuminates the stories of bold, faceless African-Americans who transformed cities and industries with their hard work and determination to provide their children with better lives. * Essence * Isabel Wilkerson's majestic The Warmth of

Isabel Wilkerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, is the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller The Warmth of Other Suns. Her debut work won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and was named to Time's 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the decade and The New York Times's list of the Best Nonfiction of All Time. Her second book, Caste, is a bold and original analysis of societal inequality. Wilkerson has taught at Princeton, Emory, and Boston Universities and has lectured at more than two hundred other colleges and universities across the United States and in Europe and Asia.