Book Recommendation: Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent

In 1976, when the New York Times reviewed Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece, “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” it said that it was “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.” 

Perhaps only for the second time in its history, the paper is making a similar recommendation again. It calls Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent “an extraordinary document, one that strikes me as an instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far.” 

I am only about halfway through the book but can confirm that the book is magnificent. Wilkerson has won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting while at The New York Times, and her previous book, “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration,” won the National Book Critics Circle Award.