Caste: The International Bestseller

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From one of America's most celebrated writers, the moving, eye-opening bestseller about power, history and what lies hidden under the surface of ordinary lives 'The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power - which groups have it and which do not' Beyond race or class, our lives are defined by a powerful, unspoken system of divisions. In Caste, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson provides a profound, eye-opening portrait of this hidden phenomenon. This is the story of how our world was shaped by caste, and how its rigid, arbitrary hierarchies still divide us today. 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 out-cast 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 we can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.

Reviews

If you haven't read Caste yet, you absolutely must -- Edward Enninful * Vogue *
Powerful and timely... I cannot recommend it strongly enough -- Barack Obama
Such is Wilkerson's gift as a writer that she leaves you looking at the world differently -- Afua Hirsch * Vogue *
Elegant and persuasive... Caste will spur readers to think and to feel in equal measure -- Kwame Anthony Appiah * New York Times Book Review *
Probably the most important piece of non-fiction published this year -- Sarah Hughes * i News *
A surprising and arresting wide-angle reframing... Her epilogue feels like a prayer for a country in pain, offering new directions through prophetic new language -- Bilal Qureshi * Washington Post *
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 * Guardian *
Persuasive and unsettling... The case Wilkerson puts forward is inspiring and hopeful... caste can be dismantled, setting everyone free -- Ashish Ghadiali * Observer *
Important and timely... If repudiation of past assumptions is the first step towards healing, Wilkerson's book offers a powerful frame for this. It is essential reading for anybody who feels angry, guilty or threatened by the tangled issue of "race" in America today -- Gillian Tett * Financial Times *
Magisterial... [Wilkerson's] reporting is nimble and her sentences exquisite. But the real power of Caste lies tucked within the stories she strings together like pearls... 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 * Star Tribune *
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 * Washington Post *
Wilkerson unearths bone-chilling parallels in systems of oppressive regimes that otherwise seem radically dissimilar to explain caste and how it predated and helped define racism in America... Caste offers a forward-facing vision. Bursting with insight and love, this book may well help save us -- Emily Bernard * O: The Oprah Magazine *
Wilkerson's genius as a writer is her ability to connect the macro and the micro, to tell you the big story of what happened but to make that story matter by linking it to the lives of those who survived it... What in the hands of another writer would feel like an abstraction attains, in her work, the vividness and emotional power of lived experience -- Ezra Klein * Vox *
Haunting yet strangely consoling, in a world defined by its divides, Caste connects. It reveals the 'unseen skeleton' embedded in heinous acts of power but, in evocative prose that is full of poise, reminds us what's possible when people come together. I closed the book feeling enlightened and energised, ready to roll up my sleeves and get on with the good work -- Johny Pitts
Should be required reading for generations to come and is as propulsive a reading experience as her debut... 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 * Boston Globe *
A transformative new framework through which to understand identity and injustice in America -- Justin Worland * TIME *
Wonderful ... Prepare to have your mind expanded, your heart break and your head slowly shake by Wilkerson's sublime combination of skilful, analytical dissection and raw, emotional testimony -- Allen Sleith * Belfast Telegraph *
Caste makes a convincing, often scorching case that caste was there at the birth of the nation, and we wrestle every day with that legacy. It upsets the already rickety national myth that anyone in the United States can be anything -albeit, without entirely abandoning that hope -- Christopher Borrelli * Chicago Tribune *
Vital, brilliant and necessary -- Kae Tempest
Similar to her previous book, the latest by Wilkerson is destined to become a classic, and is urgent, essential reading for all -- Stephanie Sendaula * Library Journal (starred review) *
This enthralling expos deserves a wide and impassioned readership * Publishers Weekly (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... The Warmth of Other Suns topped group read lists everywhere, and Caste will be the book to read in light of current discussions about systemic racism -- Vanessa Bush * Booklist (starred review) *
Wilkerson's book arrives at a key inflection point, an opening for us to imagine, and then create, a system that's better than the one we've inherited -- Jordyn Holman * Bloomberg *
An instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far... It made the back of my neck prickle from its first pages, and that feeling never went away. I told more than one person, as I moved through my days... that I was reading one of the most powerful nonfiction books I'd ever encountered... This book has the reverberating and patriotic slap of the best American prose writing... [Isabel] 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 *
Caste is the most important book I've ever selected for my book club. Should be required reading for humanity -- Oprah Winfrey
It literally changed the way I thought about the world and deepened my understanding of it more than any book I've read in a long time. It is worthy of a lifetime of study. It is a magnificent gift to our country and to people all across the world -- Bill Clinton
Absolutely extraordinary -- Bryan Stevenson
The superlatives people use to describe Caste are all accurate. This is an astonishing book with a bold premise-that race in America is a caste system like those in India and Nazi Germany. [Caste is] well written, well argued and provocative. Wilkerson made me think and taught me so much. You think you know the history of racism and then a book like this reveals that it's so much worse than you could have also imagined. Also she quotes me in the book! I dropped it when I saw that. So unexpected. A lil ego boost. But really that's just a small vanity. The book is amazing for what it accomplished and how -- Roxane Gay
Caste is rearranging my molecules right now. Isabel is one of my heroes -- Ken Burns
Yet another masterpiece -- Trevor Noah
Wilkerson is unmatched in her ability to take colossal, weighty concepts like race, class and caste and distill them into smooth, accessible prose. These 496 pages fly by, even as you savor each paradigm-shifting idea * BookPage (Best Books of 2020: Nonfiction) *
It should be at the top of every American's reading list -- Jennifer Day * Chicago Tribune *
Isabel Wilkerson's study surpasses many books on institutional racism by reframing the problem as something more vast and more concrete than that. We suffer under a caste system, with a dominant, shrinking group fighting for continued supremacy and the lower caste fighting, still, for full human rights * Los Angeles Times *
To read Isabel Wilkerson is to revel in the pleasure of reading-to relax into the virtuosic performance of thought and form one is about to encounter, safe and secure that the structures will not collapse beneath you... Caste is a masterwork of writing- a profound achievement of scholarship and research that stands also as a triumph of both visceral storytelling and cogent analysis... Wilkerson's use of a poetic focus on imagery and detailed characterization allows us an intimate and personal relationship with the lives of those she chronicles; when this empathic closeness is juxtaposed with the harsh brutality of the historical record the contrast is resonant and haunting, becoming a towering memorial to those violated by the violence of caste -- Hope Wabuke * National Public Radio *
Caste mingles comparison, history, sociology and a string of shattering stories... More than appropriately, Wilkerson likens the situation of India's Dalits to that of America's Blacks... India needs mind-shaking books like Caste that unveil for India's top layers (including for the willfully blind) the realities being endured in the thick bottom -- Rajmohan Gandhi * India Today *
A big book about our biggest problem... Wilkerson looks at structural inequality and bigotries in Germany, India, and the United States, identifying the insidious nature all forms of caste divisions share -- Kate Tuttle * The Boston Globe (Best Books of 2020) *
[Wilkerson's] aim is as ambitious as it sounds, which makes Caste's success as both a work of historical analysis and a tremendously engaging read all the more gratifying. Part of the accessibility and richness of the text come from the multiple points of entry Wilkerson offers to the idea of caste: Theatrical analogies... sit side-by-side with comparisons to the natural world... It's clear that Wilkerson has tremendous belief in

Author Bio

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. Her debut work won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and was included in Time's 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the 2010s and in The New York Times's list of the Best Nonfiction 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.