| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £2.00
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (Vintage) for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £2.00, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
One of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year
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 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.
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 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.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Despite being 500 pages long, this book is hugely readable. Wilkerson tells the story of the great migration of black Americans from the deep South to northern cities. I was unaware of this crucial piece of American history and am grateful that Wilkerson has done such a great job. The book covers the lives of three individuals, who all grew up as the descendants of slaves and went onto success in their new lives. Wilkerson is a Pulitzer-prize winning author and has spent years researching this book. The quality of her writing is superb. I would highly recommend this book for anyone interested in American and black history.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This was one of the best Christmas gifts I received and a total surprise. Although it is 500 odd pages of history, and that's minus the methodology section, acknowledgements and notes, I read it in about a week. Very readable, I found it hard to put down (despite the pain of racism that runs through it) and was totally gripped by the experience of the 3 key African American characters, participants in the mass drive to escape from Jim Crow laws and oppression in 3 southern states in America from 1937. Although a black woman myself, with a parallel experience of immigration from the Caribbean to Britain in the 1960s, this book highlighted crucial sociological facts that I hadn't previously known and experiences with which I could identify.
My learning of the reason for the mass migration has been immense specifically in relation to the economic effect on the south, the racial tensions it caused in the north, the impact of disappointment on the migrants and their off-springs, their determination to succeed nevertheless rather than return 'home' and the contribution such migrants made to the development of America as we know it today.
My one criticism - the book was repetitious in parts, but this didn't make my experience of it anything less than a brilliant read. Well done Isabel Wilkerson.
My learning of the reason for the mass migration has been immense specifically in relation to the economic effect on the south, the racial tensions it caused in the north, the impact of disappointment on the migrants and their off-springs, their determination to succeed nevertheless rather than return 'home' and the contribution such migrants made to the development of America as we know it today.
My one criticism - the book was repetitious in parts, but this didn't make my experience of it anything less than a brilliant read. Well done Isabel Wilkerson.
Format:Hardcover
I was introduced to this book by Madison Foster, a nephew of one of the families you follow. My first reaction to reading "The Warmths of Other Suns" was, that I just wanted to hold his hand and say nothing for a very long time. I was shocked, ashamed, sorry, sad and yet very impressed. I am glad to have read this wonderful book, though. I'm happy to have learned so much more about the real conditions of the black Americans. And I'm proud to be a friend of a Foster from Monroe, Louisiana.
Jytte Mejnholt, Helsingør, Denmark.
Jytte Mejnholt, Helsingør, Denmark.
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
