Books like The Warmth of Other Suns

01

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Isabel Wilkerson · Memoir

Isabel Wilkerson's second book proposes a reframing of American racial hierarchy: rather than thinking of racism primarily as prejudice, she argues that the United States has operated as a caste society, with Black Americans at the bottom of a rigidly maintained hierarchy similar in its structure — though different in its specific mechanisms — to the caste systems of India and Nazi Germany.

Shares race and identity with The Warmth of Other Suns.

02

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

Bryan Stevenson · Memoir

Bryan Stevenson's memoir of his career as a capital defense attorney in Alabama, and specifically of his years working on the case of Walter McMillian — a Black man wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to death in Monroe County, Alabama — is simultaneously a riveting legal narrative and a sustained moral argument about the American criminal justice system's treatment of the poor and of Black defendants.

Both dig into race.

03

Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates · Memoir

Between the World and Me is a letter from Ta-Nehisi Coates to his teenage son, Samori, about what it means to live in a Black body in the United States.

Shares race and identity with The Warmth of Other Suns.

04

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

Barack Obama · Memoir

Barack Obama wrote Dreams from My Father in 1995, before entering politics, after being elected the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review.

Shares race and identity with The Warmth of Other Suns.

05

Finding Me: A Memoir

Viola Davis · Memoir

Finding Me is Viola Davis's account of her childhood in extreme poverty in Central Falls, Rhode Island, and her path from that starting point to becoming one of the most decorated actors in the history of American theater and film.

Shares race and identity with The Warmth of Other Suns.

06

The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother

James McBride · Memoir

James McBride grew up in Brooklyn and Queens as one of twelve children raised by a white Jewish woman who had converted to Christianity and married a Black minister.

Shares race and identity with The Warmth of Other Suns.

07

The Sixth Man

Andre Iguodala · Memoir

Andre Iguodala won four NBA championships and a Finals MVP award, but The Sixth Man is less interested in the games than in the social and psychological landscape those games happened inside.

Shares race and identity with The Warmth of Other Suns.

08

The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit

Michael Finkel · Memoir

In 1986, a twenty-year-old named Christopher Knight drove into the woods of central Maine, abandoned his car, and walked into the forest.

Shares identity and freedom with The Warmth of Other Suns.

09

Twelve Years a Slave

Solomon Northup · Memoir

Twelve Years a Slave, published in 1853, is the memoir of Solomon Northup, a free Black man from New York who was kidnapped in 1841, sold into slavery in Louisiana, and held for twelve years before recovering his freedom.

Shares identity and freedom with The Warmth of Other Suns.

10

Into the Wild

Jon Krakauer · Biography

Into the Wild is Jon Krakauer's account of Christopher McCandless, a twenty-four-year-old who graduated from Emory University in 1990, gave his savings to charity, abandoned his car and possessions, and spent two years drifting through the American West before hitchhiking into the Alaskan wilderness in April 1992.

Shares identity and freedom with The Warmth of Other Suns.

11

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Dave Eggers · Memoir

Dave Eggers's debut memoir about losing both parents to cancer within five weeks and raising his younger brother Toph while trying to start a literary magazine in San Francisco in the mid-1990s arrived in 2000 with unusual self-consciousness about its own nature.

Both dig into identity.

12

A Promised Land

Barack Obama · Memoir

A Promised Land is the first volume of Barack Obama's presidential memoirs, covering his 2008 campaign through the first two and a half years of his presidency, ending with the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011.

Both dig into race.