The Warmth of Other Suns

<b>Brought to you by Penguin. </b><br /><br /><b>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</b><br /><br />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.<br /><br />Based on interviews with more than a thousand people, and access to new data and official records, <i>The Warmth of Other Suns</i> 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.<br /><br />Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country journeys, as well as how they changed their new homes forever.<br /><br />'A landmark piece of non-fiction' Janet Maslin, <i>The New York Times</i><br /><br />'You will never forget these people' Gay Talese<br /><br />'A brilliant and stirring epic' John Stauffer, <i>Wall Street Journal</i><br /><br />'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, <i>Guardian</i><br /><br />'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, <i>New Yorker</i><br /><br />© Isabel Wilkerson 2020 (P) Penguin Audio 2020