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The Warmth of Other Suns

The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

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The Warmth of Other Suns

By: Isabel Wilkerson
Narrated by: Robin Miles
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

From the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this is one of the great untold stories of American history: the migration of black citizens who fled the south and went north in search of a better life

From 1915 to 1970, an exodus of almost six million people would change the face of America. With stunning historical detail, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson gives us this definitive, vividly dramatic account of how these journeys unfolded.

Based on interviews with more than a thousand people, and access to new data and official records, The Warmth of Other Suns tells the story of America's Great Migration 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.

Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country journeys, as well as how they changed their new homes forever.

'A landmark piece of non-fiction' Janet Maslin, The New York Times

'You will never forget these people' Gay Talese

'A brilliant and stirring epic' John Stauffer, Wall Street Journal

'The mass migration of African Americans out of the US south forever changed the country's cultural fabric - and Wilkerson's history of this period is full of sacrifice and hope ... a long overdue account' Lettecha Johnson, Guardian

'A deeply affecting, finely crafted and heroic book. . . .Wilkerson has taken on one of the most important demographic upheavals of the past century and told it through the lives of three people ... lyrical and tragic' Jill Lepore, New Yorker

© Isabel Wilkerson 2020 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

 Americas Emigration & Immigration Freedom & Security Politics & Government Social Sciences United States Civil Rights Chicago Social justice Mississippi

Critic Reviews

A narrative epic rigorous enough to impress all but the crankiest of scholars, yet so immensely readable as to land the author a future place on Oprah's couch. (David Oshinsky, The New York Times Book Review)
Told in a voice that echoes the magic cadences of Toni Morrison or the folk wisdom of Zora Neale Hurston's collected oral histories, Wilkerson's book pulls not just the expanse of the migration into focus but its overall impact on politics, literature, music, sports -- in the nation and the world. (Lynell George)
Scholarly but very readable, this book, for all its rigor, is so absorbing, it should come with a caveat: Pick it up only when you can lose yourself entirely.
Profound, necessary and an absolute delight to read. (Toni Morrison)
Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns is an American masterpiece, a stupendous literary success that channels the social sciences as iconic biography in order to tell a vast story of a people's reinvention of itself and of a nation--the first complete history of the Great Black Migration from start to finish, north, east, west. (David Levering Lewis)
Not since Alex Haley's Roots has there been a history of equal literary quality where the writing surmounts the rhythmic soul of fiction, where the writer's voice sings a song of redemptive glory as true as Faulkner's southern cantatas. (The San Francisco Examiner)
[A] sweeping history of the Great Migration... The Warmth of Other Suns builds upon such purely academic works to make the migrant experience both accessible and emotionally compelling. (NPR.org)
One of the most lyrical and important books of the season (David Shribman)
A seminal work of narrative nonfiction. . . . You will never forget these people. (Gay Talese)
A landmark piece of nonfiction...sure to hold many surprises for readers of any race or experience...A mesmerizing book that warrants comparison to The Promised Land, Nicholas Lemann's study of the Great Migration's early phase, and Common Ground, J. Anthony Lukas's great, close-range look at racial strife in Boston...[Wilkerson's] closeness with, and profound affection for, her subjects reflect her deep immersion in their stories and allow the reader to share that connection. (Janet Maslin)
All stars
Most relevant
Beautifully written with endless insights into an unjust but fascinating part of American history. A powerful and beautiful account of what it means and what it takes to immigrate from the home that you know . Such a significant book in understanding racism in America and the people that endured and still do. Simply wonderful

Stunning, I loved this book

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An incredibly well written and thought-provoking book on immigration. So much in the book for anyone that has ever migrated to relate to.

Thought provoking

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Such a lovely set of interlocking stories each representing hope for a better future tinged with a certain melancholy knowing you can never go home again. Robin Miles’ narration is superb, subtly bringing the characters to life. I didn’t want it to end.

A beautiful telling of post reconstruction migration

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The NYT rates this book so very highly, and it's easy to see why. Tells one of the great stories of America. The narration is first class.

Extraordinary story, beautifully narrated

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The idea of mass internal migration by Blacks within the USA was initially unfamiliar, and then rapidly obvious.

This is a wonderful book on the subject, closely following the lives of three separate Blacks who left the South in the 30s to 50s, and whilst detailing their experiences, contextualising them with well-summarised statistical data.

Despite being a sociological study, the three principal characters live and breathe and are very well created, based on many hours of interviews with them, and others who knew them or where they lived.

Contrary to what had been often assumed and argued, this migrant group were among the better-educated and more energetic of the Blacks in the South, often being better educated, more stable socially and more ambitious than those they joined in the North. The author argues powerfully for the significant economic and cultural contribution of this wave of migration over roughly 50 years from 1915.

Jim Crow - a term I’d often heard but not well understood - was the term for the legal and social structures of the Southern states that kept Blacks down-trodden, segregated and at risk of injury or even violent death, long after emancipation from slavery.

Imagine the shock of the Black surgeon and former army captain, Robert Foster when in 1953, he reached parts of the USA that were not of the South, only to encounter the more genteelly presented “James Crow,” while looking for a place to sleep en route to California as he left the South.

Great fusion of characters and sociology

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