The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson 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 interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to previously untapped 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 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 state 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 medicine, becoming the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful career that allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties. Wilkerson brilliantly captures her subjects' 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 their new 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 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.

Isabel Wilkerson, the New York Times' Chicago bureau chief, earned the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 1994 for her reporting. She was the first black woman and the first African American to receive a Pulitzer Prize for solo reporting in the history of American journalism. For her coverage of the Midwest, she received the George Polk Award, and for her research on the Great Migration, she received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. She's given talks on narrative writing at Harvard University's Nieman Foundation, and she's been the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University and the James M. Emory University's Cox Jr Professor of Journalism

She is currently the Director of Narrative Nonfiction at Boston University and a Professor of Journalism. Her parents moved from Georgia and southern Virginia to Washington, D.C., where she was born and raised, during the Great Migration. This is her debut novel.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780679444329
ISBN 10	0679444327
Title	The Warmth of Other Suns
Author	Isabel Wilkerson
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Random House USA Inc
Year published	2010-09-07
Number of pages	640
Prizes	Winner of Anisfield-Wolf Book Award 2011, Winner of Mark Lynton History Prize 2011, Winner of NAACP Image Award 2010, Winner of National Book Critics Circle Awards 2010, Winner of Sidney Hillman Prize 2011, Winner of Stephen E. Ambrose Oral History Award 2011
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.