Pultizer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson's 'Caste' chosen as Oprah Winfrey's latest book club pick
Oprah Winfrey’s latest literary passion revolves around America’s “unspoken” caste system.
And it’s written by one of her favorite authors.
Isabel Wilkerson’s latest book, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” is latest Oprah’s Book Club selection.
The book, which went on sale Tuesday, was published by Random House and is already a No. 1 Best Seller on Amazon.
“Every book I’ve ever chosen for an Oprah’s Book Club selection I’ve done with care and with passion, but I don’t think there has been another pick that has been as vital as this one,” Winfrey said in her announcement on Tuesday. “This book might well save us. Caste by Isabel Wilkerson is a must-read for humanity.”
Wilkerson is an esteemed journalist, who won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her reporting as Chicago bureau chief of The New York Times.
The Washington, D.C., native became the first African-American woman to receive a Pulitzer Prize in journalism.
“I am honored and thrilled that ‘Caste’ has been chosen for Oprah’s Book Club and that its humanitarian insights will now reach a wider audience,” Wilkerson said in a statement. “This work shows that the term racism may be insufficient in our current era. We need new language, a new framework for understanding our divisions and how we got to where we are.”
“‘Caste' gives us this language. ‘Caste’ allows us to see ourselves through a different lens and the chance to work toward healing from the wounds of artificial hierarchy. We must first see it to begin to resolve it.”
The Howard University alum’s first bestselling book, 2010 1/4 u2032s “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration,” was a historical study of the movement of Black people out of the Southern areas of the United States to the Midwest, Northeast and West from approximately 1915 to 1970.
Winfrey was also a big fan of that acclaimed nonfiction work.
“I’ve got to tell you, I can’t remember when I’ve read anything that moved me this way, besides the work of [Toni] Morrison,” she told author Ayana Mathis during a 2013 interview.
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