Isabel Wilkerson Instagram – Absolutely gobsmacked and over the moon! What a tribute to the people of the Great Migration and to this watershed epic in our country’s history, at a time when we need history more than ever.
My heart is bursting with gratitude to everyone who nominated The Warmth of Other Suns to The New York Times’ list of the Best Books of the 21st Century (thus far) and who positioned it near the very top, at No. 2.
It’s been electrifying to see literature take center stage in our culture this week with the daily unfurling of the list.
This honor, to me, speaks to the beauty and power of narrative nonfiction. It’s a genre that plunges you into the lives of real people you otherwise would not know and is the closest you may ever come to “being” another person. It takes years and years of research and immersion to create a book like Warmth, to amass and distill mountains of fact and lived experience into literature that will keep you turning the page.
I so appreciate critic Dwight Garner’s generous description: “Wilkerson’s intimate, stirring, meticulously researched and myth-dispelling book, which details the Great Migration of Black Americans from South to North and West from 1915 to 1970, is the most vital and compulsively readable work of history in recent memory….”
At times like this, I think back with immense love and admiration for Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling and Dr. Robert Pershing Foster, who entrusted me with their lives and recollections not knowing the outcome. I so wish they could have lived to see this day and to know that their trials and triumphs have captivated so many for so long.
Deepest gratitude to everyone.
#bestbooks | Posted on 13/Jul/2024 02:35:37
