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Isabel WilkersonIsabel Wilkerson
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Caste (Oprah's Book Club): The Origins of Our Discontents Hardcover – 4 August 2020
by Isabel Wilkerson (Author)
4.8 4.8 out of 5 stars 43,687 ratings
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK - "An instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far."--Dwight Garner, The New York Times
The Pulitzer Prize-winning, bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions.
#1 NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR: Time
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, O: The Oprah Magazine, NPR, Bloomberg, The Christian Science Monitor, New York Post, The New York Public Library, Fortune, Smithsonian Magazine, Marie Claire, Slate, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews
Winner of the Carl Sandberg Literary Award - Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize - National Book Award Longlist - National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist - Dayton Literary Peace Prize Finalist - PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Finalist - PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Longlist - Kirkus Prize Finalist
"As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power--which groups have it and which do not."
In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched, and beautifully written narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.
Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people's lives and behavior and the nation's fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people--including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball's Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others--she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their outcasting of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.
Original and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of American life today.
544 pageshts?
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Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt, and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy.
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Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.
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“No one was white before he/she came to America,” James Baldwin once said.
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In the American caste system, the signal of rank is what we call race, the division of humans on the basis of their appearance. In America, race is the primary tool and the visible decoy, the front man, for caste.
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Review
"Magnificent . . . a trailblazing work on the birth of inequality . . . Caste offers a forward-facing vision. Bursting with insight and love, this book may well help save us."--O: The Oprah Magazine
"This book has the reverberating and patriotic slap of the best American prose writing. . . . Wilkerson has written a closely argued book that largely avoids the word 'racism, ' yet stares it down with more humanity and rigor than nearly all but a few books in our literature. . . . It's a book that changes the weather inside a reader."--Dwight Garner, The New York Times
"A surprising and arresting wide-angle reframing . . . Her epilogue feels like a prayer for a country in pain, offering new directions through prophetic language."--Bilal Qureshi, The Washington Post
"A transformative new framework through which to understand identity and injustice in America."--Justin Worland, Time
"Magisterial . . . Her reporting is nimble and her sentences exquisite. But the real power of Caste lies tucked within the stories she strings together like pearls. . . . Caste roams wide and deep, lives and deaths vividly captured, haloed with piercing cultural critique. . . . Caste is a luminous read, bearing its own torch of righteous wrath in a diamond-hard prose that will be admired and studied by future generations of journalists."--Hamilton Cain, Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Brave, clear and shatteringly honest in both approach and delivery . . . Extrapolating Wilkerson's ideas to contemporary America becomes an unsettling exercise that proves how right she is and how profoundly embedded into society the caste system is. . . . Her quest for answers frames everything and acts as the perfect delivery method for every explanation."--Gabino Iglesias, San Francisco Chronicle
"Caste draws heavily on the powerful mingling of narrative, research, and visionary, sweeping insight that made Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns the definitive contemporary study of African Americans' twentieth-century Great Migration from the Jim Crow South to northern, midwestern, and western cities. It deepens the resonance of that book (a seemingly impossible feat) by digging more explicitly into the pervasive racial hierarchy that transcends region and time."--Steve Nathans-Kelly, New York Journal of Books
"Caste will spur readers to think and to feel in equal measure."--Kwame Anthony Appiah, TheNew York Times Book Review
"Wilkerson's book is a powerful, illuminating and heartfelt account of how hierarchy reproduces itself, as well as a call to action for the difficult work of undoing it."--Kenneth W. Mack, The Washington Post
"Should be required reading for generations to come . . . A significant work of social science, journalism, and history, Caste removes the tenuous language of racial animus and replaces it with a sturdier lexicon based on power relationships."--Joshunda Sanders, The Boston Globe
"[Caste] should be at the top of every American's reading list."--Jennifer Day, Chicago Tribune
"An expansive interrogation of racism, institutionalised inequality and injustice . . . This is an American reckoning and so it should be. . . . It is a painfully resonant book and could not have come at a more urgent time."--Fatima Bhutto, The Guardian
"Full of uncovered stories and persuasive writing . . . Opening up a new bank of language in a time of emboldened white supremacism may provide her readers with a new way of thinking and talking about social injustice. . . . A useful reminder to India's many upper-caste cosmopolitans . . . that dreams of resistance are just one part of the shared inheritance of the world's oldest democracy, and the world's largest."--Supriya Nair, Mumbai Mirror
"It is bracing to be reminded with such precision that our country was built through genocide and slavery. But Ms. Wilkerson has also provided a renewed way of understanding America's longest, fiercest trouble in all its complexity. Her book leaves me both grateful and hopeful. I gulped it down."--Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Mountains Beyond Mountains
"Like Martin Luther King, Jr. before her, Isabel Wilkerson has traveled the world to study the caste system and has returned to show us more clearly than ever before how caste is permanently embedded in the foundation and unseen structural beams of this old house called America. Isabel Wilkerson tells this story in prose that is so beautiful, the only reason to pause your reading is to catch your breath. You cannot understand America today without this book."--Lawrence O'Donnell
"This enthralling exposé deserves a wide and impassioned readership."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Similar to her previous book, the latest by Wilkerson is destined to become a classic, and is urgent, essential reading for all."--Library Journal (starred review)
"This is a brilliant book, well timed in the face of a pandemic and police brutality that cleave along the lines of a caste system."--Booklist (starred review)
About the Author
Isabel Wilkerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, is the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller The Warmth of Other Suns, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and was named to Time's 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the 2010s and The New York Times Magazine's list of the best nonfiction books of all time. She has taught at Princeton, Emory, and Boston Universities and has lectured at more than two hundred other colleges and universities across the United States and in Europe and Asia.
Product details
Publisher : Random House (4 August 2020)
Language : English
Hardcover : 544 pages
ISBN-10 : 0593230256
ISBN-13 : 978-0593230251
Dimensions : 16.26 x 3.35 x 24.21 cmBest Sellers Rank: 61,780 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)92 in Sociology of Social Theory
114 in Sociology of Class
920 in Social HistoryCustomer Reviews:
4.8 4.8 out of 5 stars 43,687 ratings
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Isabel Wilkerson
Isabel Wilkerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, is the author the critically acclaimed New York Times bestsellers The Warmth of Other Suns, and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.
Her first book, The Warmth of Other Suns, tells the story of the Great Migration, a watershed in American history. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Nonfiction, the Lynton History Prize from Harvard and Columbia universities, the Stephen Ambrose Oral History Prize and was shortlisted for both the Pen-Galbraith Literary Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
WARMTH was named to more than 30 Best of the Year lists, including The New York Times' 10 Best Books of the Year, Amazon's 5 Best Books of the Year and Best of the Year lists in The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and The Economist, among others. In 2019, TIME Magazine named Warmth to its list of the10 best books of the decade.
Her second book, CASTE: The Origins of Our Discontents, explores the unrecognized hierarchy in America, its history and its consequences. Caste became a No. 1 New York Times bestseller, was the 2020 summer/fall selection for Oprah’s Book Club and was longlisted for the National Book Award. It was named to more best of the year lists than any other work of nonfiction. TIME named it the No. 1 nonfiction book of 2020. Publishers Marketplace named it the book of the year across all genres. In 2021, it was the most borrowed nonfiction library book in the United States, according to Quartz Magazine.
Wilkerson won the Pulitzer Prize for her work as Chicago Bureau Chief of The New York Times in 1994, making her the first black woman in the history of American journalism to win a Pulitzer and the first African-American to win for individual reporting. In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded her the National Humanities Medal for "championing the stories of an unsung history."
She has appeared on national programs such as "Fresh Air with Terry Gross," CBS's "60 Minutes," NBC's "Nightly News," "The PBS News Hour," MSNBC's "The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell," “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah,” NPR's "On Being with Krista Tippett," the BBC and others. She has taught at Princeton, Emory and Boston universities and has lectured at more than 200 other colleges and universities across the U.S. and in Europe and Asia.
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T. Hill
5.0 out of 5 stars Great readReviewed in Australia on 19 April 2024
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Really enjoying this book so far. I was intrigued to read it after going to see the movie Origin. The movie is true to the book in terms of the author’s journey. I’m finding it very easy and interesting to read, unlike some non-fiction books which can be hard to follow
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Cindy
4.0 out of 5 stars The book tells it as is - There’s so much to learnReviewed in Australia on 10 January 2021
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Great education for anyone who cares to know and learn!
One person found this helpful
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Belinda
4.0 out of 5 stars Thought provoking, well researchedReviewed in Australia on 5 May 2021
Synopsis:
In Caste, Pulitzer Prize winning author Isabel Wilkerson makes a bold and compelling argument that an unspoken caste system shaped America as we know it, and that that same caste system continues to define social, political, and educational structures in the US.
The author provides a well researched narrative blended with individual examples and her own personal history to show how this rigid ranking and hierarchy of humans based on skin colour in the US has links to the caste systems of India and Nazi Germany.
Through exploration of the impact of caste systems on healthcare, politics, life expectancy and culture (amongst other things), she makes a compelling argument for the dismantling of caste systems for the betterment of mankind.
My thoughts:
This has been on my to be read pile since it's release so I was glad to do a group read with @readingwithcamille to help pull apart some of the themes and discuss ideas.
This book required lots of highlighting of important paragraphs, ideas and quotes which I have subsequently revisited and reflected on.
I found the book to be very well researched and the author's arguments were certainly compelling, particularly in regards to the comparisons in India and Nazi Germany. Reading about slavery and the history in the Jim Crow South was disturbing and not for the faint hearted, but provided context as to how the current systems in the US came to light. I also found the book provided some context as to how and why Donald Trump was elected, and was very nearly re-elected.
It wasn't a 5 star read for me as the individual stories whilst adding emphasis, were not provided with references or discussion about how the information was sourced - as such, for me, they lacked rigour as evidence of her argument and were somewhat distracting in an otherwise well researched and referenced book.
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Brad Smith
1.0 out of 5 stars So bloody boringReviewed in Australia on 26 January 2021
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Why does everyone love a victim? There is a singular theme of a downtrodden section of society. It has been acknowledged so move on.
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Gian Sandhu
5.0 out of 5 stars America's Hidden RealityReviewed in Canada on 24 November 2023
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"Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” is America's hidden reality and a must-read. It is a compelling and eye-opening book, particularly for those with a solid grasp of world history. It exposes the deeply entrenched, yet often overlooked, treatment of the Black community in particular and other minorities in general in the United States. The author skillfully compares this with global historical events, shedding light on similarities and drawing powerful parallels. This highlights the gravity of these injustices and challenges readers to re-evaluate their understanding of American history.
The narrative is well-researched and emotionally resonant, effectively connecting historical facts with their human experiences. The book goes beyond recounting past injustices and examines their lasting impacts on contemporary American society and culture. "Caste” is a transformative read, offering a profound perspective on American history and identity. A must-read.
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Bridget Koehler
5.0 out of 5 stars Highly recommended!Reviewed in Spain on 17 April 2024
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Excellent! Thoughtfully detailed work by the author. Can be informative and certainly very beneficial to anyone who may be curious about how “one up-one down/ “Us vs. them” mentality is still working its power and control in the larger society. The author put forth an incredible book.
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K.holst
5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing and sadReviewed in Germany on 4 April 2024
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The story of slavery and what followed in the USA. The author goes back and forth between now and then, and you realize that little has change for a black person today. Very well written and extremely intereting.
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Cool Vindaloo
5.0 out of 5 stars Insightful and very necessaryReviewed in the United Kingdom on 2 April 2024
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A really enlightening book, well written and full of humanity. This is real woke, and we need more of it.
It should be on the school curriculum.
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Ingemar Claesson
5.0 out of 5 stars Vem är jag egentligen?Reviewed in Sweden on 27 February 2024
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Omvälvande, provocerande, livsförändrande texter om liv, fördomar och Nordisk Arrogans.
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