NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER In this beautifully written
masterwork the Pulitzer Prize winnner and bestselling author of Caste 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 compares this epic
migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand
people and gained access to new 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 historical 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 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 a medical career the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of
a glitteringly successful medical career which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he
often threw exuberant parties.Wilkerson brilliantly captures their 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 these 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 and riveting work a superb
accountof 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.
