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    The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
    The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
    The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
    Audiobook22 hours

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

    Written by Isabel Wilkerson

    Narrated by Robin Miles

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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.

    NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER
    LYNTON HISTORY PRIZE WINNER
    HEARTLAND AWARD WINNER
    DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE FINALIST

    NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
    The New York Times • USA Today • O: The Oprah Magazine • Amazon • Publishers Weekly • 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

    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 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.

    Editor's Note

    Sweeping and riveting…

    Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson brings to life the previously overlooked story of the Great Migration, when millions of African Americans uprooted their lives to move from the South to cities across the US from 1915 to 1970. Sweeping and riveting, Wilkerson’s book made the ZORA Canon, a list of 100 of the greatest books written by African American women.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateMar 1, 2011
    ISBN9781455814251
    The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
    Author

    Isabel Wilkerson

    Isabel Wilkerson won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her reporting as Chicago bureau chief of The New York Times. The award made her the first black woman in the history of American journalism to win a Pulitzer Prize and the first African American to win for individual reporting. She won the George Polk Award for her coverage of the Midwest and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for her research into the Great Migration. She has lectured on narrative writing at the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University and has served as Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University and as the James M. Cox Jr. Professor of Journalism at Emory University. She is currently Professor of Journalism and Director of Narrative Nonfiction at Boston University. During the Great Migration, her parents journeyed from Georgia and southern Virginia to Washington, D.C., where she was born and reared. This is her first book.

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    Reviews for The Warmth of Other Suns

    4.5/5

    1,566 ratings166 reviews

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    • 5/5
      My preferred rating is 10. That would be 5 for the book and 5 for the narration. This is the kind of narrative that changes the reader.
    • 5/5
      Extraordinary! As a 64-year-old who grew up white and privileged, this book helped me feel what it was like to have gone through these challenging experiences. I love that this book not only gave me a much deeper education on the great migration, but gave me much deeper empathy for what so many black people had to go through. Highly recommended!
    • 5/5
      Heavily researched book filled with information that was never afforded to American students when I was in school.
    • 5/5
      This book is excellent! Beautifully written and thoughtful while well researched!
    • 5/5
      Fantastic history of the Great Migration, told as three separate people's stories. These three moved out of the South during three different decades of the twentieth century. I really enjoyed this book, although it was hard and painful to read about the obstacles these Black Americans faced and had to overcome or work around. This book has given me a different perspective on the population of the northern cities like Detroit, Chicago, and New York.
    • 5/5
      Perfect! If you want to know not just about the migration but essentially what it meant to be black in America during the 20th Century then read this book. It's truly eye opening and life changing.
    • 5/5
      This book both broke my heart and made me proud of my grandmother and some of her siblings to move up north for a better life. I have no other words other than this should be a mandatory read for high schoolers
    • 5/5
      This book really helps you understand the Black migration to the North and West. The personal stories keep you yearning for more and bring about a range of emotions.
    • 5/5
      An incredible journey spanning decades from 1910 to the 2012, reliving the lives of three great people, experiencing their pain, terror and frustrations in the South, living through Jim Crow. It was a revelation of the real America, founded on the backs of black people who were taken from their homes, forced to work for the white people and used and discarded like rags. Every American citizen or resident needs to read this book without judging or blaming but with humble reflection on the capacity of human beings to be evil and for some to rise above their natures and thrive despite the evil and terror around them. What white America did to black people is comparable to what the Nazis did to the Jews in the holocaust. Like the Germans, Americans should never forget!
    • 5/5
      I struggle to find the words that would convey what The Warmth of Other Suns conveyed. It is a captivating mesh of stories of personal struggle, perseverance, and growth. It provides historical insight in the most personal way. Well researched, well written, informative and moving.
    • 5/5
      Amazing research and great reporting by the author. Do not miss this book
    • 5/5
      Awesome book on migration. In-depth knowledge of racial injustice cries of today
    • 5/5
      A masterwork. Engrossing telling of a complex story. Beautifully read and presented. I cried when it was finished. I was grateful for every minute. Brilliant.
    • 5/5
      This is a high-impact book with no judgement or harsh blame. Highly recommend. Especially if you’re from the South.
    • 5/5
      Great book. Wonderful history lesson. I learned so much from the characters lives and their journey. An eye opener for sure.
    • 5/5
      These stories helped me learn about why & how the migration happened. It also gave a good explanation for why black people cannot build generational wealth the same way as white people. wish I had been required to read this earlier in life; it should be on school reading lists!
    • 5/5
      This book was phenomenal. It gave a much deeper history of the Great Migration than other material you have probably read on the topic. Beautifully written and very enlightening.
    • 5/5
      EXCELLENT, EXCELLENT, EXCELLENT .The narrator was also EXTREMELY good .
    • 5/5
      This is a vitally important and utterly compelling book. It is clear that underneath the book is a commitment to academic rigour but there is nothing about it that is dry or formal. The lives of the three prime characters illustrate the lived experience of the great migration really well. Wilkerson has produced a wonderful work of history blended with three stunning biographies. Superb!!!
    • 5/5
      It details an enormous migration within the United States, taking place over decades, by weaving the life stories of three amazing individuals - who were born during Jim Crow- into the circumstances and events that surrounded them and in which they unintentionally played roles, as they each moved forward on one of three paths out of the South, leading to the transformation of the South, North, East and West, and the sparking of many creative movements that changed American life and culture, in addition to opening pathways toward a more equitable society.
    • 5/5
      This was so awesome so glad I was finally able to read/listen. Awesome. I want to read again.
    • 5/5
      Beautiful, uncolored and accurate description of recent African American history. Love how she presented facts alongside true life stories. I also enjoyed how she described the 'caste' system, and compared this migration to other migrations around the world. Here, African American history is depicted clearly so that anyone can understand the feelings of the individuals that have lived and are currently living it. Everyone should read this book!
    • 5/5
      Fascinating and breathtaking in scope. Many traumatic events were difficult to listen to but need to be told. I learned so much from this book.
    • 5/5
      You’ll fall in love with the characters! Within their three stories of leaving the south, historical data on demographics and research on blacks migrating to the north are explained. This book challenges what you think you know and also enlightens you to the very disturbing behavior of whites towards blacks.
    • 5/5
      This book wrecked me.

      The Warmth of Other Suns is nonfiction about the migration of Black southerners into the north and west, and toward freedom. We follow three migrants from the beginning to the end of their lives, and broader facts are distributed throughout, giving this book a personal, memoir feel.

      The writing is engaging, immersive, conversational, and totally captivating.

      I thought I knew a lot about this topic. I didn’t. Or I didn’t know the right things, the details. The people. The truth.

      I learned so much. My emotions were all over the place.

      This book needs to be mandatory reading in every single American high school. Everyone should read it. Really. Just read it. Because I have few words and way too many feelings.

      The narrator is perfection, as is the writing.
    • 5/5
      Beautifully and brilliantly written. I captured and kept me til the last word. Thank you Ms. Wilkerson.
    • 5/5
      This book is important, moving and enjoyable on all levels.
    • 5/5
      Ms. Wilkerson's detailed biographies of three individuals representing the great migration of African Americans out of the south following the failure of post Civil War Reconstruction until the 1960s is a remarkable combination of superb academic research, profound empathy, and evocative writing. Her telling of the oftimes harrowing travels to escape the oppressive racism of Jim Crow and the ordeals imposed by an equally denigrating environment in the cities of the North and West make for nail-biting reading. Her close and sympathetic relationships with the three very different people Who are the focus of her narrativeuntil the end of their days around the turn of the 21st century
    • 4/5
      Very informative and she has quite clearly done her research. She describes characters and settings beautifully. I do however think the book could be shorter if she hadn't repeated information so frequently.
    • 5/5
      Wilkerson illustrates the great migration through the biographies of three Americans, one who travelled from Mississippi to Chicago, one from Florida to New York City, and one from Louisiana to California, representing the three major routes of migration. This is an inspired idea, but what is really impressive is the amount of work it required. Wilkerson interviewed 1200 people just to find these three Americans, and it was time well-spent, because their stories are dramatic, very different from each other, and yet representative of the places they left, the cities they settled, and the times they lived. Wilkerson provides historical context alongside the biographical segments, anchoring the biographies in time and place. Personally, this book enlightened me to the cultural geography of my country and gave me a context for understanding some of the literature that came out of the generations born to these migrants.