NPR's Book of the Day Folgen

The Color Purple is about the survival of Black women in a male-dominated world. Author Alice Walker said that she just wrote what happens in the real world. The book has been made into a film and a Broadway musical already – now it's being turned into a new musical film. In 1982, Walker told former NPR reporter Faith Fancher that "one of the reasons I wanted to have strong, beautiful, wonderful women loving each other is because I think that people can deal with that. [...] I think that the people who are uptight and bigoted and afraid in their own lives will have difficulty."Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Isabel Wilkerson followed her novel about The Great Migration, The Warmth of Other Suns, with another book that looks at why it happened. Caste – recently made into a film by director Ava DuVernay – argues that caste and not racism is actually what Black people were fleeing when they left the Jim Crow South. Wilkerson told Throughline's Ramtin Arablouei and Rund Abdelfatah that the term racism is rooted in hate but caste is about "power and how those other groups manage and navigate and seek to survive in a society that's created with this ranked hierarchy."Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This week, we're hearing from authors whose works have been adapted to the big screen. In this 2017 interview, NPR's Steve Inskeep asks David Grann about his nonfiction book Killers of the Flower Moon, which recounts how white settlers conspired to kill members of the Osage Nation in the 1920s in order to take over their oil-rich land in Oklahoma. The story – which also involves the FBI's first major homicide investigation – is at the center of Martin Scorsese's latest film.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy