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Describe your latest book/project/work. Another Great Day at Sea is an account of my experiences aboard the USS George H. W. Bush. It's a masterpiece of the form, widely hailed as the best book ever written about my time on the George H. W. Bush. Also, I have two early novels, The Colour of Memory [...]

We asked our readers: What was the last book that you couldn't put down, that kept you up all night, that you couldn't stop recommending? We were delightfully surprised by the number of replies we received. Here are some of our favorites. We'll be posting more on a regular basis, so check back often. And [...]

It’s a pretty big accomplishment for a first-time author to land on the New York Times bestsellers list, but Isabel Wilkerson definitely deserves it. The Pulitzer-prize winning journalist spent 15 years researching and conducted over 1,200 interviews for The Warmth of Other Suns, an account of the men and women who lived through the Great Migration, when 6 million African-Americans moved to the North.

One of the biggest challenges the author says she faced was time. ” I tried to find the oldest members of this migration and capture a range of experiences,” she explained in the latest Mediabistro feature.

“One of the men I chose, the one from Florida, was keenly aware that he was speaking to unborn generations of people. He took it very seriously. At one point he said, ‘If you don’t hurry up and finish this book, I’m gonna be proofreading from heaven.’ And he was right. He didn’t live to see the book.”

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President Obama is on his nine day vacation on Martha’s Vineyard with his wife Michelle and their two daughters. Obama is known for having good taste in books, because he has read Netherland by Joseph O’Neil and Freedom by Jonathan Franzen for his past summer vacations. This time he brought almost all novels. Unlike past presidents, Obama picks are serious literary fiction novels.

Winter’s Bone author Daniel Woodrell’s The Bayou Trilogy, is a trio of “Country Noir” novels. Rodin’s Debutante by Ward Just is a coming of age boarding school tale in postwar era Chicago, where Obama started his political career.

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese is about twin boys in Ethiopia raised by an Indian nun, one of whom turns out to be a doctor. He could be reading this because Obama lived in Africa for a little while as a child, Kenya not Ethiopia, before moving back to the U.S.   To the End of the Land by David Grossman is a book about war in Israel and the relationship between a woman and her two sons, each fathered by different men. The subject of a war forcing people to separate them from their families is an important one right now.

President Obama does have a nonfiction book on his reading list: Pulitzer Prize Winner Isabel Wilkerson’s A Warmth of Other Suns, about the migration of black southerners to the North and Midwest. It looks like Obama has some good reading material for his days on Martha’s Vineyard.

Full Name: Isabel Wilkerson

Birthplace: Washington D.C.

Website: IsabelWilkerson

Genre: Narrative Nonfiction

Most Recently Published Work: The Warmth of Other Suns


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Can you tell us a little about The Warmth of Other Suns?

The Warmth of Other Suns is a work of narrative nonfiction about one of the biggest underreported stories of the 20th Century: the Great Migration of six million African-Americans from the South to the North and West throughout much of the century. This migration was a defection from a caste system that controlled the lives of everyone in the South until it was finally dismantled after the civil rights era. This migration changed the country North and South and reshaped American culture as we know it.

In "The Warmth of Other Suns," the story of this migration is told through three people who set out for New York, Chicago and Los Angeles along the three main migration streams out of the South. They each left under different circumstances, for different reasons, from different states, during different decades and their lives unfolded in different ways in the New World.

I don't read a lot of nonfiction but I loved The Warmth of Other Suns. When I finally picked it up I couldn't put it down.

How often do you hear similar sentiments from other fans?

Thank you for the kind words about the book being hard to put down. I hear that all the time, and it warms my heart to know that all the work that went into making the stories come alive was worth the effort. Another thing that people say is that they sometimes have to put it down and contemplate what they have just read because parts of the book -- or rather, parts of fairly recent American history -- are so difficult and at times, wrenching.

They also note the funny and ironic parts of the book that come through because each of the protagonists, despite the hardships they faced were keen observers of human behavior and had a great sense of humor. Others have said they were sad as they neared the last pages because they had grown to love the three characters and did not want the story to end

What's the key to writing engaging nonfiction?

I think the key to writing engaging nonfiction is, first, to have a passion for the subject because you will need it to get through all the hard work this entails. Second, finding fully realized protagonists who are dedicated to the truth of their experience, through whom to tell the story, because in nonfiction, you can't make it up!

Finally, telling the story as a narrative -- meaning a character-driven unfolding of things with a beginning, middle and end, rather than a dry recitation of facts based on categories or subject headings. This helps draw the reader in and stay with the story to see how everything turns out

African Americans mass exodus out of the South during Jim Crow changed the landscape of America, yet your debut is the first to focus solely on this movement. Why do you think