New York: Random House, (2020) dj. Hardcover first edition - Pulitzer Prize winning author, Isabel Wilkerson, examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions. Dwight Garner writing in the NY Times calls this "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.. . one of the most powerful nonfiction books I'd ever encountered. She makes unsettling comparisons between India's treatment of its untouchables, or Dalits, Nazi Germany's treatment of Jews and America's treatment of African-Americans. Each country 'relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement.' and she poses the question so many intellectuals on the left have posed, with increasing befuddlement: Why do the white working classes in America vote against their economic interests? What these pundits had not considered, Wilkerson writes, 'was that the people voting this way were, in fact, voting their interests. Maintaining the caste system as it had always been was in their interest. And some were willing to accept short-term discomfort, forgo health insurance, risk contamination of the water and air, and even die to protect their long-term interest in the hierarchy as they had known it.'" A selection of Oprah's book club. Notes, bibliography, index. xvii, 470 pp. ISBN: 978-0593230251.