The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration Audiobook (Free)

In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles among the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, searching for an improved life.

NATIONAL Publication CRITICS CIRCLE Prize WINNER

LYNTON HISTORY PRIZE WINNER

HEARTLAND AWARD WINNER

DAYTON LITERARY Tranquility PRIZE FINALIST

NAMED ONE OF THE 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE ENTIRE YEAR BY

THE BRAND NEW York Times • USA Today • O: The about The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration Oprah Publication • Amazon • Publishers Weekly • Salon • Newsday • The Daily Beast

NAMED ONE OF THE BETTER BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY

THE BRAND NEW Yorker • The Washington Post • The Economist • Boston World • San Francisco Chronicle • Chicago Tribune • Entertainment Weekly • Philadelphia Inquirer • The Guardian • The Seattle Times • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Christian Research Monitor

From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six mil people changed the facial skin of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of various other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and obtained access to brand-new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic accounts of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our metropolitan areas, 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 later years, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharpened and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil privileges, saw his family fall, and lastly found tranquility in God; and Robert Foster, who still 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 house where he often threw exuberant celebrations.

Wilkerson brilliantly catches their initial treacherous and exhausting cross-country journeys by car and teach and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, aswell as how they changed these metropolitan areas with southern meals, faith, and tradition and improved them with self-discipline, drive, and hard work. Both a riveting microcosm and a significant assessment, THE HEAT of Various other Suns is a bold, amazing, and riveting work, a superb accounts of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its analysis, as well as the fullness from the people and lives portrayed herein, this publication is destined to become a classic.