…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. It made the back of my neck prickle from its first pages, and that feeling never went away…[Caste] 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. Caste deepens our tragic sense of American history. It reads like watching the slow passing of a long and demented cortege. In its suggestion that we need something akin to South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, her book points the way toward an alleviation of alienation. It's a book that seeks to shatter a paralysis of will. It's a book that changes the weather inside a reader.