Author: Isabel Wilkerson
Publisher & Date: Vintage, 4 Oct 2011
Page Count: 640 pages
ISBN: 978-0679763888
Age/Reading Level: High School/College/Adult
Representation:
Other Information:
Book Information
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.
Challenges & Bans
This titles challenges often stem from a controversial Tennessee law (HB 580) that prohibits lessons causing students to feel “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of race”.
Specific Challenges*:
Awards & Accolades
The Mark Lynton History Prize (winner); The Anisfield-Wolf Award for Nonfiction (winner); The Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize (winner); The Hurston-Wright Award for Nonfiction (winner); The Hillman Prize for Book Journalism (winner); NAACP Image Award for Best Literary Debut (winner); Stephen Ambrose Oral History Prize (winner); National Book Critics Circle Award (winner); The PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction (finalist); Dayton Literary Peace Prize (finalist); New York Times Bestseller; Time’s Ten Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade; New York Times’ Five Best Books of the 21st Century; Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Century; Los Angeles Times’ #1 Nonfiction book of the last 30 years; Oprah Daily Best Nonfiction Book of the past two decades
Named to “Top 10 Best Books of the Year” lists by: The New York Times, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, O: The Oprah Magazine, Salon, Newsday, The Daily Beast; Named One of the Best Books of the Year by The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Economist, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Entertainment Weekly, Philadelphia Inquirer, The Guardian, The Seattle Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Christian Science Monitor
