Isabel Wilkerson - The warmth of other suns the epic story of Americas great migration

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction
Winner of the Mark Lynton History Prize
Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Prize for Nonfiction
Winner of the Sidney Hillman Prize for Book Journalism
Winner of the Stephen E. Ambrose Oral History Award
Winner of the NAACP Image Award for Best Literary Debut
The Chicago Tribunes Heartland Prize for Nonfiction

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.

The Wall Street Journal

Not since Alex Haleys Roots has there been a history of equal literary quality where the writing surmounts the rhythmic soul of fiction, where the writers voice sings a song of redemptive glory as true as Faulkners southern cantatas.

San Francisco Examiner

The Warmth of Other Suns is epic in its reach and in its structure. Told in a voice that echoes the magic cadences of Toni Morrison or the folk wisdom of Zora Neale Hurstons collected oral histories, Wilkersons book pulls not just the expanse of the migration into focus but its overall impact on politics, literature, music, sportsin the nation and the world. Wilkerson has logged not just the dates and figures that make these stories fact and thus formal history, shes made indelible the fading music of these voices, the dance of their speech patterns, the intricate chemistry of folk cures and cornbread rendered from scratch. Beyond the family china or a great-grandmothers wedding ring, there was always the ambient fear that these stories were actually the most fragile pieces in the hope chestthe easiest to go missing. What shes done with these oral histories is stow memory in amber.

Los Angeles Times

In a book that, quite amazingly, is her first, Ms. Wilkerson has pulled off an all but impossible feat. She has documented the sweeping 55-year-long migration of black Americans across their own country. She has challenged the dismissive assumptions that are sometimes made about that migration. [Ms. Wilkersons] hard work, keen insight and passionate personal commitment make The Warmth of Other Suns a landmark piece of nonfiction. Her closeness with, and profound affection for, her subjects reflect her deep immersion in their stories and allow the reader to share that connection. A book sure to hold many surprises for readers of any race or experience.

Janet Maslin, The New York Times

One of the most lyrical and important books of the season. The Warmth of Other Suns, written by the daughter of participants in this great wave, is a monument to deep research and even deeper reflection. These stories, case studies written as novellas, humanize this movement and place it squarely within the most American of experiences, for whether in the front of the train or at the back of the bus, these migrants did what so many others in American history did, move from a place of oppression to someplace else in search of something better.

The Boston Globe

[A] deeply affecting, finely crafted and heroic book. Wilkerson has taken on one of the most important demographic upheavals of the past centurya phenomenon whose dimensions and significance have eluded many a scholarand told it through the lives of three people no one has ever heard of. Narrative nonfiction is risky; it has to be grabby, telling, and true. To bear analytical weight, it has to be almost frighteningly shrewd. In The Warmth of Other Suns, three lives, three people, three stories, are asked to stand in for six million. Can three people explain six million? Do they have to? Your answers probably depend, mostly, on your intellectual proclivities. Youre reading this magazine; chances are you lean toward thinking that stories, good stories, explain. This is narrative nonfiction, lyrical and tragic and fatalist. The story exposes; the story moves; the story ends. What Wilkerson urges, finally, isnt argument at all; its compassion. Hush, and listen.

Jill Lepore, The New Yorker

[A] massive and masterly account of the Great Migration. Based on more than a thousand interviews, written in broad imaginative strokes, this book, at 622 pages, is something of an anomaly in todays shrinking world of nonfiction publishing: 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 Oprahs couch.

The New York Times Book Review

There have been many books written on the migration of Southern blacks to the North, but Wilkersons might surpass them all in ambition, scope, breadth and storytelling.

Minneapolis Star Tribune

Mesmerizing. What makes [The Warmth of Other Suns] compelling is the remarkable intimacy of the stories she tells; her ability to re-create, in wonderfully lyrical prose, the private struggles of particular men and women caught in a system designed to denigrate them.

Chicago Tribune

An indelible and compulsively readable portrait of race, class, and politics in 20th-century America. History is rarely distilled so finely.

Entertainment Weekly

A captivating tale of hardship and perseverance that is at once epic, and strikingly intimate.

The Daily Beast

[The Warmth of Other Sunss] power arises from its close attention to intimate details in the lives of regular people. If you want to learn about what being a migrant felt like, read Wilkerson. Her intimate portraits conveyas no book prior ever haswhat the migration meant to those who were a part of it. The Warmth of Other Suns stands as a vital contribution to our understanding of the black American experience and of the unstoppable social movement that shaped modern America.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

An astonishing work. 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 Wilkersons majestic The Warmth of Other Suns shows that not everyone bloomed, but the migrantsWilkerson prefers to think of them as domestic immigrantsremade the entire country, North and South. Its a monumental job of writing and reporting that lives up to its subtitle: The Epic Story of Americas Great Migration.

USA Today

[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

The Warmth of Other Suns is a beautifully written, in-depth analysis of what Wilkerson calls one of the most underreported stories of the 20th century. A masterpiece that sheds light on a significant development in our nations history.

San Jose Mercury News

The Warmth of Other Suns is a beautifully written book that, once begun, is nearly impossible to put aside. It is an unforgettable combination of tragedy and inspiration, and gripping subject matter and characters in a writing style that grabs the reader on Page 1 and never lets go. Woven into the tapestry of [three individual] lives, in prose that is sweet to savor, Wilkerson tells the larger story, the general situation of life in the South for blacks. If you read only one book about history this year, read this. If you read only one book about African Americans this year, read this. If you read only one book this year, read this.