The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration [B0765]

2011 PB. WINNER: The Mark Lynton History Prize; The Anisfield-Wolf Award for Nonfiction; The Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize; The Hurston-Wright Award for Nonfiction; The Hillman Prize for Book Journalism; NAACP Image Award for Best Literary Debut; Stephen Ambrose Oral History Prize; National Book Critics Circle. "A brilliant and stirring epic . . . 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, The Wall Street Journal.

In this beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson presents a definitive and dramatic account of one of the great untold stories of American history: the Great Migration of six million Black citizens who fled the South for the North and West in search of a better life, from World War I to 1970. Wilkerson tells this interwoven story through the lives of three unforgettable protagonists: Ida Mae Gladney, a sharecropper's wife, who in 1937 fled Mississippi for Chicago; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, and Robert Foster, a surgeon who left Louisiana in 1953 in hopes of making it in California. Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous cross-country journeys by car and train and their new lives in colonies in the New World. 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 a modern classic.