From Oprah Magazine: Isabel Wilkerson is the author of Caste, the latest Oprah’s Book Club Pick, which offers a paradigm-shifting understanding of the caste system at work in the U.S…. Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free!
Isabel Wilkerson has written the Great American Novel–and America is the main character. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson’s second non-fiction book, offers the story of the United States as it has never been told before. The sweeping 500-page tome book offers a paradigm-shifting understanding of caste and how it functions in the United States.
Oprah calls Caste her “most important” book club pick to date. Critics elsewhere have offered similarly rapturous praise. In his review for the New York Times, Dwight Garner called Caste an “instant American classic,” “the keynote nonfiction book of the American century,” and “one of the most powerful nonfiction books I’d ever encountered,” all within the first three paragraphs of his review.
Caste is the culmination of Wilkerson’s long career as an award-winning journalist and author. Her list of accolades is extensive: She began as editor-in-chief of the newspaper at Howard University before going on to become the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism in 1994. At the time, she was the Chicago Bureau Chief of the New York Times, an experience which she weaves into Caste. She was recognized for her two articles reporting on 1993 floods and a 10-year-old boy’s life.
While at New York Times, Wilkerson reported on a range of topics whose underlying themes of race, class, and citizenship in the U.S. and beyond would be echoed in Caste, a book that puts the U.S.’s caste system in conversation with India’s and Nazi Germany’s. Wilkerson wrote intimately about women on welfare in Chicago; teenage drug dealers reflecting on how crack cocaine reshaped their community; initiatives to improve the public school system; representation of Black characters on TV; and the travails of displaced Gulf Coast residents following Hurricane Katrina.
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